Márquez José A, Cipriani Florent
European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Grenoble Outstation, Grenoble, France.
Methods Mol Biol. 2014;1091:197-203. doi: 10.1007/978-1-62703-691-7_14.
The last years have seen a major development in automation for protein production, crystallization, and X-ray diffraction data collection, which has contributed to accelerate the pace of structure solution and to facilitate the study of ever more challenging targets through macromolecular crystallography. This has led to a considerable increase in the numbers of crystals produced and analyzed. However the process of recovering crystals from crystallization supports and mounting them in X-ray data collection pins remains a manual and delicate operation. Here we present a novel approach enabling full automation of the crystal mounting process and describe the operation of the first-automated CrystalDirect harvesting unit. Implications for crystallography applications and for the future operational integration of automated crystallization and data collection resources are discussed.
在过去几年中，蛋白质生产、结晶以及X射线衍射数据收集的自动化取得了重大进展，这有助于加快结构解析的速度，并通过大分子晶体学促进对更具挑战性的目标的研究。这使得所产生和分析的晶体数量大幅增加。然而，从结晶载体上回收晶体并将其安装到X射线数据收集针上的过程仍然是一项手工且精细的操作。在此，我们提出一种新颖的方法，可实现晶体安装过程的完全自动化，并描述首个自动化晶体直接收获单元的操作。还讨论了对晶体学应用以及自动化结晶和数据收集资源未来操作整合的影响。
