The Protein Data Bank (PDB) was set up in 1971 to capture information about the seven crystal structures then available.  Today, this incredible resource contains over 86,000 structures, gets about 140,000 visits per month and underpins much of the success of structural biology.  Along with atomic coordinates, the PDB contains some information about the crystallisation conditions used to generate the crystal used in the X-ray analysis: this is captured (in free format) in the REMARK280 field.  We have mined these REMARK280 data to yield a set of crystallisation conditions associated with successful X-ray crystal structure determinations.  Using an empirical distance metric, we compare each of the successful conditions with a non-redundant set of commercially available crystallisation conditions.  This analysis allows us to assess the appropriateness of the commercial conditions, and may be used to guide optimisation strategies when crystal screening does not produce a well-diffracting crystal.