Nanoliter-Scale Protein Crystallization and Screening with a Microfluidic Droplet Robot

作者：Zhu, Ying; Zhu, Li-Na; Guo, Rui; Cui, Heng-Jun; Ye, Sheng; Fang, Qun^*

来源：Scientific Reports, 2014, 4(1): 5046.

DOI：10.1038/srep05046

• FREE INTERFACE DIFFUSION
• STRUCTURAL GENOMICS
• VAPOR-DIFFUSION
• DRUG DISCOVERY
• PLATFORM
• MICROBATCH
• CRYSTAL
• CRYSTALLOGRAPHY
• TECHNOLOGIES
• DIFFRACTION

Large-scale screening of hundreds or even thousands of crystallization conditions while with low sample consumption is in urgent need, in current structural biology research. Here we describe a fully-automated droplet robot for nanoliter-scale crystallization screening that combines the advantages of both automated robotics technique for protein crystallization screening and the droplet-based microfluidic technique. A semi-contact dispensing method was developed to achieve flexible, programmable and reliable liquid-handling operations for nanoliter-scale protein crystallization experiments. We applied the droplet robot in large-scale screening of crystallization conditions of five soluble proteins and one membrane protein with 35-96 different crystallization conditions, study of volume effects on protein crystallization, and determination of phase diagrams of two proteins. The volume for each droplet reactor is only ca. 4-8 nL. The protein consumption significantly reduces 50-500 fold compared with current crystallization stations.

• 出版日期2014-5-23
• 单位浙江大学