Development of a fully automated macromolecular crystallization/observation robotic system, HTS-80.

A robotic system has been developed to be used for macromolecular crystallization and observation in typical university laboratories with a research focus on protein crystallography. The system consists of three major parts: a dispenser unit, a storage unit and an observation unit. This system is designed to automatically perform all of the processes involved in crystallization and observation without requiring any manual operations. The dispenser and observation units can carry out both sitting-drop vapor-diffusion procedures and microbatch procedures. With this system, the procedures are controlled by a personal computer running GUI-based software. After the dispensing of protein solution into the crystallization plates, they are automatically transferred to the storage units, followed by automatic observation according to a required schedule with arbitrary intervals. At each stage of crystallization, droplets in the crystallization plates are examined by original image-processing software in order to evaluate the appearance of the crystals.