Fluidigm Completes Protein Crystallization Platform

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 http://www.fluidigm.com, addresses both of these concerns. Now the South San Francisco-based company has enhanced and expanded its TOPAZ line, providing reagents and newly designed chips as well as hardware to set up and image the crystallization reactions. It's all part of the company's strategy of providing "everything from screen to beam," says product manager Kristin Spataro.

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. ...