Protein structure determination continues to be an important aspect of understanding cellular function and it is foundational to structure-based drug design. Macromolecular X-ray crystallography remains the benchmark technique for determining protein structures at atomic resolution, but high throughput screening workflows continue to suffer from time- and sample-consuming bottlenecks that result in an ≈ 85% failure rate in the production of diffraction quality crystals. DeNovX uses engineered nucleation features that can reduce the energetic barriers to nucleation to improve crystallization outcomes for proteins while preserving diffraction quality. Replicate, controlled batch vapor diffusion crystallization studies using engineered nucleation features show 1.1-9.0-fold increases in crystallization hit percentages while reducing the crystallization onset times by an average of 40% for select known crystallizers and challenge proteins. The use of engineered nucleation features also produces an average of 2.5-fold more crystalline material, which is beneficial for emerging serial crystallography data collection techniques using flowing sample injection. This presentation will discuss batch protein crystallization results in high throughput screening plates as a benchmark and preliminary studies of protein crystallization in microliter droplet-based microfluidics that incorporate engineered nucleation features to improve crystallization outcomes.

Enhancing protein crystallization successes in droplet-based microfluidics using a surface science approach

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.