W0071

Automation for Enabling the Renaissance of Protein Crystallography. Don Rose, Dave Riling and Bryan Greenway, DataCentric Automation, 2525 Perimeter Place Dr., Suite 131, Nashville, TN 37214

The human genome project has catalyzed the field of “proteomics”, resulting in a number of new efforts such as protein chips and sophisticated mass spectrometry techniques. Moreover, the field of protein crystallography, in existence long before proteomics, is experience a significant renewal. Protein structures have become important in structural genomics initiatives (e.g. proteins across many genomes) as well as part of drug discovery efforts (e.g. target structures used in compound selection).

However, this renaissance of protein crystallography will only occur if the following key elements are in place:

Techniques for rapidly purifying substantial quantities of proteins

Robust and reliable automation for preparing large numbers of crystallization conditions

Informatics for analyzing the huge amount of data from large crystallization experiments

This presentation will review the current state of automation for crystallography and include the following:

Defining the different levels of automation (manual, semi-automated, fully-automated).

Delineating the different approaches (workstations vs integrated systems) in terms of throughput and cost

Describing the options for automation for each of the crystallization techniques (hanging drop, sitting drop and microbatch) in terms of vendor offerings and mapping various products to steps of the techniques (e.g. reagent preparation, plate assembly, plate imaging).

Describing current software and hardware bottlenecks that exist today and technologies and products which will be needed to increase the throughput of automation.