Crystallography Fail
by Jason on May 14 2008 (2030 Views)Hi, I’m Jason and I’m a gradstudent doing organic/inorganic work or trying to at least. It’s finals week for me so that means lots of studying and even more time sitting online wasting time not studying.
I really like recent chemistry failure postings so I thought I would add my latest crystallography failure.
Normally getting a crystal structure is the last and in most cases easiest part of a research project. You finally get that single crystal to grow perfectly after 30 tries. Its sometimes tough and boring but in the end crystallography is great.
The best part is no matter how bad you are at interpreting your NMR or assigning mass spec fragments no one can argue with your crystal structure…That is if you can get a good structure.
In maybe 95% of cases you can get a great structure without too much work. Unfortunately this is not one of those cases. This particular crystal didn’t like getting blasted by x-rays and quickly died before I could collect enough data.
I really like how the program gives me an honest opinion about my structure… “get help from a professional crystallographer”.
Ouch, that program just owned you.
In response to Mitch, and for Mitch.
http://jason.justgotowned.com/
This post totally made my day. (Schadenfreude, anyone?)
Seriously, the last four compounds I’ve submitted have all failed to diffract well. We have no idea why for three of them.
Seriously, you have my sympathy.
What program is that?
Its called Crystals. Its free and pretty easy to use. http://www.xtl.ox.ac.uk/crystals.html
Just use Shelxtl. Remember, you are smarter than the program. Crystals will make you think it’s smarter than you.
I would but the school won’t give me a copy for my laptop. Solving crystal structures is just a lot more fun when I can do it at home drinking beer and still say I’m working.