Squeezing the most from every crystal: the fine details of data collection

Modern synchrotron beamlines offer instrumentation of unprecedented quality, which in turn encourages increasingly marginal experiments, and for these, as much as ever, the ultimate success of data collection depends on the experience, but especially the care, of the experimenter. A representative set of difficult cases has been encountered at the Structural Genomics Consortium, a worldwide structural genomics initiative of which the Oxford site currently deposits three novel human structures per month. Achieving this target relies heavily on frequent visits to the Diamond Light Source, and the variety of crystal systems still demand customized data collection, diligent checks and careful planning of each experiment. Here, an overview is presented of the techniques and procedures that have been refined over the years and that are considered synchrotron best practice.