A drunken search in crystallization space.

The REMARK280 field of the Protein Data Bank is the richest open source of successful crystallization information. The REMARK280 field is optional and currently uncurated, so significant effort needs to be applied to extract reliable data. There are well over 15 000 crystallization conditions available commercially from 12 different vendors. After putting the PDB crystallization information and the commercial cocktail data into a consistent format, these data are used to extract information about the overlap between the two sets of crystallization conditions. An estimation is made as to which commercially available conditions are most appropriate for producing well diffracting crystals by looking at which commercial conditions are found unchanged (or almost unchanged) in the PDB. Further analyses include which commercial kits are the most appropriate for shotgun or more traditional approaches to crystallization screening. This analysis suggests that almost 40% of the crystallization conditions found currently in the PDB are identical or very similar to a commercial condition.