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Re:Faked Crystallography by COGlory on Sunday July 31, 2022 @04:07PM (#32298341)
Depends. A random metallo-organic compound vs a random protein? Yes. But the problem can be further up the chain. Synthesis can be expensive and difficult, and you need a relatively large crystal (at least for X-ray). If you have low symmetry, you need several relatively large crystals all of which need to collect enough data before they die to integrate across the datasets. It typically isn't thought to be as challenging, but it can be.
Re:Faked Crystallography by muaytimbo on Monday August 01, 2022 @11:43AM (#32307671)
In my experience it's always been easier both growing and solving organometallic compounds. Borrowing the phase from previously solved structures is trivial for organometallic compounds which simplifies the density modeling while the fact that most organometallic compounds lack the chirality found in every protein generally means they pack into higher symmetry groups facilitating the growth of larger high quality crystals.