Our mission is to build automation people use. For protein crystallization experiments, automation can help dealing with the exceedingly large number of experiments needed to grow protein crystals large enough to allow sampling an X-ray pattern that can be used for structure determination. In particular, automation impacts:
- Accurate control of experimentation: Manual pipetting is not only extremely time consuming, but is also prone to errors. Automated screen makers can achieve accuracies with coefficients of variation (CVs) of 2% or better for all relevant viscosities.
- Freeing up time spend otherwise doing repetitive tasks: Crystallization plates need to be periodically imaged to detect protein crystals. Given the fact that in many cases thousands of conditions need to be tested to crystallize a single protein crystal, imaging plates can become a serious bottleneck to structure determination.
- Protecting your samples: Protein crystals are extremely fragile and careless and/or repetitive handling of crystallization plates can cause protein crystals to disintegrate before they have a chance to grow to sizes suitable for X-ray inspection. Carefully designed automation equipment can help minimize these issues.
Manual processing or automation? A scientist prepares a 96-well plate for imaging - resulting in 288 images produced by a single mouse click.
In that sense, each step in the protein crystallization pipeline (screen making, drop setting, incubation and imaging) can benefit from automation. For example, a scientist using a walk-up inspection microscope, inserting manually a 96-well plate, will generate 288 images. These images are taken by an automated microscope that will inspect all 3×96 drops on the plate.
Still, when the sheer number of plates becomes too large to handle, each step in the crystallization pipeline can be integrated into a fully automated environment. Using this approach, the JCSG processes about 4,000 96 well plates a month and extracts 500 protein crystals a week. As a result, the JCSG has managed to solve over 1,000 crystal structures.
High throughput protein crystallization: The JCSG processes about 4,000 96 well plates a month and extracts 500 protein crystals a week.
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Click here to learn more about fully automated protein crystallization at Rigaku.com.
