Courtesy of Fluidigm
Fluidigm's TOPAZ 1.96 screening chips employ microscale channels and valves for diffusive mixing of protein and crystallization reagents. Future chip designs will steadily increase parallel throughput.
Protein structure determination using X-ray crystallography typically suffers from two major bottlenecks: producing sufficient quantities of material, and finding appropriate crystallization conditions. The TOPAZ™ Crystallizer, released last year by microfluidics start-up Fluidigm
Fluidigm's first-generation Crystallizer was a manual, free-interface diffusion (FID)-based system that allowed researchers to screen 48 crystallization conditions on a single chip, at three different concentration ratios, for a total of 144 reactions. ...