Growing and dissolving protein crystals in a levitated and containerless droplet

Magnetic field has been found to be able to improve the quality of some protein crystals; containerless condition is considered to be beneficial for growing good-quality crystals. Nevertheless, there has been no report on combination of these two conditions for protein crystallization. In this paper, crystallization and dissolution of protein crystals in a levitated containerless droplet in a strong magnetic field has been successfully achieved. New phenomena were observed for both crystallization and dissolution processes.