Magnetic gravity trick grows perfect crystals

• 18:28 10 August 2007
• NewScientist.com news service
• Kurt Kleiner

One of the few scientific success stories of the International Space Station has been its use to grow large, pure crystals in microgravity (see Space station unlocks new world of crystals).

Now scientists from the Netherlands and Japan have shown that a strong magnetic field can mimic the effects of microgravity when growing protein crystals. The new Earth-bound technique could provide a cheaper and easier way to produce crystals of the same quality as those grown aboard the ISS.

The approach uses the same principle famously employed to levitate a live frog in 1997. This exploits the fact that diamagnetic materials - including most organic materials - are repelled by very strong magnetic fields as a result of changes in the orbital motion of their electrons.

Researchers at the High Field Magnet Laboratory at Radboud University in Nijmegen and colleagues at Tohoku University, Japan, have now shown that this effect can be used to grow a pure crystal of the protein lysozyme.

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