APPLICATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY:

• Protein characterization at synchrotron facilities (primary application) and laboratories.
• Wide range of application, from large-scale screening and analysis of thousands of samples per year to experimental processing of a few samples per day.
• Potential users include pharmaceutical companies, emerging genomic and proteomic companies, universities, and national laboratories
  
  

ADVANTAGES:

• Significant increases in throughput and reliability
  
• Faster sample mounting and alignment
  
• Reduction of human error
  
• Greater precision and stability in alignment

ABSTRACT:

Joseph Jaklevic, Thomas Earnest, and other scientists at Berkeley Lab have invented an integrated robotic crystal mounting and alignment system for high-throughput biological crystallography. This instrument facilitates the remote and unattended mounting and alignment of protein crystals for x-ray diffraction analysis.

This invention successfully addresses several major problems that have plagued the field of protein crystallography, including the necessity for storage of the samples in liquid nitrogen and maintaining the samples near liquid nitrogen temperature (–164°C) throughout the mounting, alignment, and data-acquisition processes. The instrument consists of 4 major components oriented toward the manipulation of protein crystals. The precision and stability of the alignment can be maintained within a few microns.

	Part of the graphical user interface used to select samples in the Dewar and mount/unmount them is shown on the left side of the photo above. The crystal centering window is on the right.

Current procedures are largely manual, requiring constant operator intervention at the measurement station and causing synchrotron beam time to be lost during screening because of crystal manipulation and alignment. When the hardware components of this invention are operated as a fully integrated system, remote sample mounting and alignment of individual samples can be achieved in less than 20 seconds with minimal operator involvement. This compares to roughly five minutes per sample manually. The ability to perform these tasks remotely and automatically provides the opportunity for significant increases in throughput and reliability for large-scale protein characterization.

This invention is a successful response to NIH and DOE recommendations for designing automated systems for use at synchrotron facilities.

	At the Advanced Light Source the Berkeley Lab robot precisely mounts tiny protein crystals in a crystallography beamline.

STATUS:

• Published Patent Application. Available for licensing

REFERENCE NUMBER: IB-1762