Talk:Biological unit

From PDBWiki

Here is a paragraph that I cut from the page;

The result of a typical structure determination experiment is a pattern of 'reflections' that results from X-ray diffraction. From this data the electron distribution of the crystal structure can be reconstructed to give the electron density map of the crystal. Discussion of the refinement process here? This object represents the (theoretically) infinite crystal, and is therefore difficult to store on a computer. For this reason, the crystallographic 'asymmetric unit' is stored instead. The asymmetric unit (ASU) is the smallest non-symmetrical chunk of the crystal. The ASU can represent the whole (infinite) crystal by the addition of a series of symmetry operations.

--Dan 02:05, 24 January 2008 (KST)