Common misconceptions

General

• Why do you guys bother to purify and crystallize proteins? There are these great webservers that send you the structure back, just given the sequence!

Data collection

• Whenever we go to the synchrotron I delete my old synchrotron frames from the disk, to make room for the fresh data. It is good enough to keep the reduced data. Also I had some bad experiences with using old datasets - I had trouble reading those DVDs so this is a useless exercise anyway. Science has to move forward - no use to look back!

Data reduction and refinement

• Whenever I collect a new dataset from my protein I run uniqueify on it because it's made for that purpose, and it's really easy to do. I have good experiences with this - my free R-factors are always close to the work R-factors which attests to the quality of models I build!

Refinement

• It is not worth adjusting all the side chains of my newly solved structure, because I'm so busy with other things and work at the display strains my eyes. I'm anyway only interested in the active site, so why bother with the rest?

Computers

• The graphics performance (in, say, Coot) of this SLI-capable motherboard with its two NVidia graphics cards is great. The machine was somewhat costly but two graphics cards really help when looking at atomic details when displaying a 100 A radius electron density map.