The article mentions problems due to impurities a couple of times. If you grow an unsatisfactory crystal due to impurities, it will still be purer than the starting material, so you could re-dissolve it to make a more pure solution for another attempt:
This is fascinating, and the crystals look so cool! I also recently got into chemistry, mainly for metal finishing like anodizing, and also making my own medication as I can't rely on the healthcare system.
It is amazing! For serious stuff, you need a lot of materials and equipment, but a lot can be done with the simplest of tools and proper knowledge. Having a room full of simple lab equipment I still feel like Heisenberg lol
Dangerous can be necessary, unfortunately. The US healthcare system for instance routinely fails large demographics of people, leaving them to foot the bill for excessively expensive medication that increases in price year after year (despite no significant chemical change to the active components). Making one's own insulin can quite literally be the difference between life and death. AIDs medication is another prime example of this.
See https://fourthievesvinegar.org/ for an interesting home-biolab premise if you''d like to know more about stuff like this. Their approach isn't perfect, but its a solution to a problem that most people otherwise would have no ability to change.
I believe that it is achieved through CRISPR edited yeast, or possibly another easily cultured bacterial species (E. Coli perhaps?). The cells replicate and are then portioned and lysed, the solution is spun down in a centrifuge, separated for waste and the yield extracted and purified.
If you ever have the chance, the gemstone section of the Perot museum in Dallas is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. I had no idea there were just so many different types of gems and so many colors.
As someone who is not a biologist, I wonder if some of the same principles are at play in biology and genetics. The only thing that comes to mind for me is the "contagious" nature of prions, which sounds a bit like crystallization to me.
Very cool crystals. A lot of them look like the icon for a crystal you'd see in a video game.
Can you add dyes to color them? Or will the crystal exclude the dyes as impurities? Maybe the could be dipped after growth is complete (or added to a surface coat?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recrystallization_(chemistry)