The Influence of Gravity on Single Crystallization in Large Volume Drops

Abstract

The chemical, physical, and biological properties of more than two millions of proteins which follow to be synthesized by Pharmaceutical Industry, can be anticipated (by using their XRD diffrac-tograms) if they will be grown from aqueous drops as high quality, large volume single-crystals. This is not a simple task and usually the growing process is seen as art rather than a science. The growing is expensive, time consuming, and finally an amorphous aggregate may result instead one single-crystal. In this article, we show for the first time how one single crystal can be grown in large volume hanging drops through their fast evaporation. The single nucleation is determined by choosing the proper sense of gravitational force relative to the drop triple line contact. In a special configuration, single-crystals of glycine and threonine were rapidly grown.