We will accelerate your crystallization process by failing fast! With the ORYL screener, we provide immediate and actionable feedback to guide the choice of crystallization conditions. Instead of waiting for micron-sized crystals to appear, we monitor the onset of nano-crystal formation and follow the dynamics of nano-crystal growth. Crystalize your proteins now and save time and money.
We will improve your crystallization process
Protein crystallization is used to investigate the structure and function of proteins (or other biomolecules). It is used to understand how proteins function in order to develop better drugs and vaccines and to cure diseases. Crystallization is a repetitive and time consuming process (more art than science) and is a major bottleneck in the early phases of drug discovery. With the ORYL Screener we can help you solve the structure of your proteins and accelerate your crystallization process:
- Find crystals that lead to structure. By automatically monitoring the growth of crystals at each well condition, we can help eliminate null conditions as well as identify conditions that lead to precipitate, micro crystals, or macro crystals.
The beautiful crystal in (A) didn’t attract, the ugly looking crystal in (C) diffracted the best.
Image courtesy of FEBS PRESS – Protein crystallography for aspiring crystallographers or how to avoid pitfalls and traps in macromolecular structure determination.
- Find crystals with the right size. Depending on your experiments, we can help you grow macro-crystals (>1 µm) for single crystal X-ray diffraction or nano-crystals (< 1 µm) for micro electron diffraction (MicroED) or for X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs).
- Particle size measurement. Aside from finding the crystal, the ORYL screener can perform routine particle size measurement of your drops and characterize the homogeneity of your nano-crystals.
- Solubility limit of small chemical compounds. As an added bonus, the ORYL screener can determine the solubility limit of small chemical compounds in a 96 well plate format. Now you can be assured of the quality of your chemical libraries.
How It Works
Our technology is based on second harmonic generation (SHG), a second-order nonlinear optical process where two input photons of the same frequency are spatially and temporally overlapped to generate an output photon of twice the frequency. It is a nonlinear optical effect that is inherently sensitive to orientational order. This means that groups of molecules that are oriented in the same direction (e.g. crystals) will generate a strong SHG response while groups of molecules that are randomly oriented (e.g. precipitate) will generate a weak SHG response. For more information on the theory of SHG, visit Method – LBP on EPFL website.
The Oryl Screener will help you find micro or macro crystals depending on your experiment needs.
Step 1: Automated Screening
Systematic detection of crystalline conditions:
- Differentiate crystalline structures
from amorphous precipitates - Monitor nano-crystal growth
Step 2: Analysis
Automated analysis of chemical phase space
- Systematically identify candidate conditions
Step 3: Obtain the right crystal size
Imaging: MACRO-crystals, >1 µm
Light scattering: MICRO-crystals, <1 µm