{"id":102,"date":"2008-04-11T05:21:58","date_gmt":"2008-04-11T05:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2008\/04\/11\/size_is_everything\/"},"modified":"2008-04-11T05:21:58","modified_gmt":"2008-04-11T05:21:58","slug":"size_is_everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2008\/04\/11\/size_is_everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Size is everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flicking through the RSS for my favourite journal just now, I noticed that of the dozen or so crystal structure papers (out of the thirty or so new papers), two sets of authors felt it necessary to state the structural resolution in the paper’s title<\/em>. They were 1.6 and 1.8 \u00c5ngstrom structures; not too shabby, I guess. A third authorial team were moved to begin their title High-Resolution Structure of<\/strong> … and the abstract claims 1.1 \u00c5.<\/p>\n

\nNow, resolution is one metric used to judge crystal structures: more objective information is obtained from the Free R<\/em><\/a> , geometry deviations and other parameters<\/a> . The ‘resolution’ does tell us what me might expect to ‘see’, however, and appears incredibly seductive to the professional scatterbrain.<\/p>\n

\nAnd there is a bit of a hierarchy. Go to any talk in which there is a crystal structure described, and watch the speaker’s face when it comes to resolution. Although the Free R<\/em> tells you how good<\/em> the structure is, all the other crystallographers want to know the resolution. The speaker will mumble if the resolution is higher (i.e. worse) than about 3 \u00c5ngstrom, be pretty upbeat if it’s in the range 2.0 \u2013 2.6 \u00c5, and positively beam if the data is better (i.e. lower) than 2 \u00c5. And then there’s the ‘Holy Grail’ of 1 \u00c5 structures, with low Free R<\/em>, which quite frankly are rather neat because you can see<\/a> that Kekul\u00e9<\/a> was right.<\/p>\n

\nYou see the same in papers. A crystallographer with a better than 2 \u00c5ngstrom data set will want to skite in the title \u2014 and maybe they also wanted to let everyone know that they scored synchrotron time (as ‘in house’ X-Ray sets tend not to allow collection of data at better than ~ 1.8 \u00c5 resolution, although yours truly managed 1.6 \u00c5 once<\/a>)01474-2 ).<\/p>\n

\nIt’s a matter of pride<\/a> , I fear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flicking through the RSS for my favourite journal just now, I noticed that of the dozen or so crystal structure papers (out of the thirty or so new papers), two sets of authors felt it necessary to state the structural … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}