Sci Rep. 2014 May 23;4:5046.
Ying Zhu, Li-Na Zhu, Rui Guo, Heng-Jun Cui, Sheng Ye , Qun Fang*
Abstract
Large-scale screening of hundreds or even thousands of crystallization conditions while with low sample consumption is in urgent need, in current structural biology research. Here we describe a fully-automated dropletrobot for nanoliter-scalecrystallizationscreening that combines the advantages of both automated robotics technique for proteincrystallizationscreening and the droplet-based microfluidic technique. A semi-contact dispensing method was developed to achieve flexible, programmable and reliable liquid-handling operations for nanoliter-scaleproteincrystallization experiments. We applied the dropletrobot in large-scale screening of crystallization conditions of five soluble proteins and one membrane protein with 35-96 different crystallization conditions, study of volume effects on proteincrystallization, and determination of phase diagrams of two proteins. The volume for each droplet reactor is only ca. 4-8 nL. The protein consumption significantly reduces 50-500 fold compared with current crystallization stations.
Text link:http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140523/srep05046/pdf/srep05046.pdf