W0213

A Complete, Automated System for Tracking, Recording, and Screening Crystal Growth Trials. Rhett Affleck, Eric Hansen, Rob Neeper, and John Lillig, Discovery Partners International, 9640 Towne Centre Dr., San Diego, CA 92121.

Discovery Partners has created the Crystal Farm Imaging System, a compact, environmentally controlled, stand-alone robotic instrument for storing, tracking, imaging, and analyzing crystallization plates in the search for suitable crystallization conditions. The Crystal Farm was designed from scratch specifically to alleviate this bottleneck in the crystallization process, and therefore includes several features to optimize crystal growth performance and data collection, while maintaining ease of use and format flexibility.

The Crystal Farm holds more than 300 standard or Linbro-sized plates or 600 microbatch plates, and it can capture more than 10,000 images per day. Plate storage, robotics, and imager are all contained within a single temperature-controlled chamber, which has the size and portability of a standard laboratory refrigerator. Vibration is minimized to less than is possible by human manipulation by isolation of the compressor and custom designed motion controls. Temperature can be set between 4 °C and 40 °C and is controlled to ± 1 °C. The optics have automated focus, zoom, and aperture with an unusually large depth of field, long working distance, and 1 micron resolution. Illumination is from filtered Xenon flash sources to avoid sample temperature increases during image capture.

Software for the Crystal Farm is web-based with the Crystal Farm acting as a server that can be accessed by any permitted user from a browser at any location through an intranet or over the internet. Scheduling of protein droplet imaging is automated, simple, and modifiable. Images are easily selected, queued, and scored. Well conditions and other experimental conditions and results are stored in an open architecture database for straightforward export or querying of the data.