Office of Educational Programs, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973-5000, USA.
Energy Sciences Directorate, NSLS II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973-5000, USA.
Acta Crystallogr D Struct Biol. 2018 Oct 1;74(Pt 10):986-999. doi: 10.1107/S2059798318011506. Epub 2018 Oct 2.
Crystal harvesting has proven to be difficult to automate and remains the rate-limiting step for many structure-determination and high-throughput screening projects. This has resulted in crystals being prepared more rapidly than they can be harvested for X-ray data collection. Fourth-generation synchrotrons will support extraordinarily rapid rates of data acquisition, putting further pressure on the crystal-harvesting bottleneck. Here, a simple solution is reported in which crystals can be acoustically harvested from slightly modified MiTeGen In Situ-1 crystallization plates. This technique uses an acoustic pulse to eject each crystal out of its crystallization well, through a short air column and onto a micro-mesh (improving on previous work, which required separately grown crystals to be transferred before harvesting). Crystals can be individually harvested or can be serially combined with a chemical library such as a fragment library.
晶体收获一直难以实现自动化，仍是许多结构测定和高通量筛选项目的限速步骤。这导致晶体的制备速度快于晶体收集用于 X 射线数据采集的速度。第四代同步加速器将支持数据采集的极高速度，这对晶体收获瓶颈造成了更大的压力。本文报道了一种简单的解决方案，可从经过轻微修改的 MiTeGen In Situ-1 结晶板中通过声学方法收获晶体。该技术使用声脉冲将每个晶体从其结晶井中弹出，穿过短的空气柱，落在微网格上（优于之前的工作，之前的工作需要在收获前分别转移已生长的晶体）。晶体可以单独收获，也可以与化学文库（如片段文库）串联收获。
