Today was truly a fantastic day. Please pardon me while I geek out with a story.

I've been working to solve the structure of one particular protein since May. Before that, three separate rotation students and a postdoc put three years of manpower into the project.
As you may remember from my last post, I spent midnight to 6am at the Advanced Light Source collecting data on the umpteenth heavy-metal soaks for these crystals. After halfway processing most of the data from Monday's synchrotron trip, I was mighty discouraged, since none of the data looked promising. However, I started one more computing job before heading home to get some sleep.
Today I went into the lab thinking dark thoughts and trying to plan the next set of experiments. I was actually halfway through making up some solutions for an entirely new set of gold and platinum derivatizations when someone asked me how the data looked. Suddenly, I was reminded of the computational experiment I had set running before I left. I didn't really think it had worked, but the guy I was talking to wanted to take a look, so I trudged out to the computer room with him. The first thing we brought up was the initial electron density map from the last-minute job.

SHAZAM. A perfect alpha helix strared back at us.

Over the last several months my project has become infamous as the structure that (inexplicably) couldn't be solved. Take that, Laue!