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Are you seeing skin form on the surface of your drops containing sample and reagent and wondering what to do?
Skins on the drop are considered bad. These skins are believed to be a layer of denatured protein. Skins can slow down the rate of vapor diffusion.
Pick away the skin before mounting your crystal. If the skin wraps around the crystal it can affect the limit of diffraction.
To avoid skins one can try crystallize under oil(1). Either put a few microliters of oil on top of the sitting drop, or use the microbatch under oil method.
Keep in mind that covering the sitting drop with oil will affect the rate of vapor diffusion equilibration. The following oils are ranked in order of the rate of equilibration allowed by the oil Paraffin Oil (slowest rate), Als' Oil (medium rate), Silicon Oil (highest rate).
Reference:
1. Pearl, B.O’Hara, R.Drew, S.Wilson. Crystal Structure of AmiC: the controller of transcription antitermination in the amidase operon of Pseudomonas earuginosa. EMBO Journal 13. (1994), pp 5810-5817
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