Crystal Former

Microlytic uses high-throughput microfluidic manufacturing to produce the Crystal Former, a device designed to improve protein crystallization hit rates by taking advantage of the favorable physical conditions that occur at the microscale. These conditions, when combined with the Crystal Former’s special materials, unique surface treatment, and proprietary mixing kinetics, substantially improve crystallization success rate, as demonstrated for multiple model proteins.

 

Each Crystal Former chip contains 16 crystallization chambers allowing for efficient sampling of the protein-precipitant phase space for 16 precipitant conditions. The Crystal Former is quick and easy to set up, requires no external equipment and is compatible with multi-channel pipettes and liquid handling robots. The unique mixing kinetics taking place in each crystallization chamber allows for a multitude of phase space trajectories that are conducive to crystal formation substantially improving crystallization hit rates. Once crystals are formed inside a Crystal Former crystallization chamber it can be extracted and used for collection of X-ray diffraction data. Thus the Crystal Former allows the user to go directly from screen to scructure in a single chip.