Author Spotlight: High-Throughput Screening to Obtain Crystal Hits for Protein Crystallography

Getting a crystal to perform diffraction experiments remains a challenge because it's difficult to predict what parameters will influence crystallization. We favor the experimenter by screening 1536 crystallization conditions in a single plate and use advanced imaging technologies to identify even the smallest crystal hits. Structural biology techniques are developing rapidly and the field has been revolutionized by computational structure prediction.

This has caused the field to become more integrative with several experimental or computational approaches more commonly being combined to generate a more detailed and accurate representation of biological mechanisms. Generating crystal hits is a key step to performing single crystal x-ray diffraction experiments and to developing techniques like micro ED and serial crystallography. Using advanced imaging methods, UVTBF and SHG along with the power of the Marco algorithm helps us identify useful crystals at all size scales.

Our high throughput crystallization methods have generated a large amount of data for probing questions regarding efficiency of crystallization cocktail components. The specialized imaging we do reveal how non-linear optical methods can be used to detect vanishingly small crystals. Finding crystallization conditions is critical for crystal based structural methods, which account for 90%of all structural models in the protein data bank.

In 2021, close to 2 million files were downloaded per day from the PDB emphasizing the impact structures have in paving the way for further scientific investigations.