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Published online 5 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.801
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Crystals grown in a flash
A nanopulse of laser light is enough to trigger crystallization.
A technique that creates crystals on demand using laser pulses could make it easier to prepare the high-quality crystals needed to study protein structure.
Chemists and biologists need crystals of proteins and other chemicals to analyse their atomic structure using X-rays, while many industrial processes rely on triggering crystal formation at precisely the right time and place during the production of drugs and other useful compounds.
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Next we will use a laser track to guide crystal growth to the shape desired... then we can generate single crystals in the shape of each alphabetical letter! A great day for science that will be.
Proteins are chiral. If the laser pulses are circularly polarized, does one optical chirality differentially favor triggered crystallization? Benzil is achiral, but it crystallizes in enantiomorphic space groups P3(1)21 and P3(2)21. Can one space group be selectively induced?
To Uncle Al: that is a very insightful comment! Infact we have already tried this with sodium chlorate which crystallizes in a chiral space group, and also with 1,1′-binaphthyl. We don't see a very strong effect at all: it lies within the uncertainties of our measurement so far, but we are still working on it.