X-ray Transparent Microfluidic Chip for Mesophase-Based Crystallization of Membrane Proteins and On-Chip Structure Determination.

ABSTRACT: Crystallization from lipidic mesophase matrices is a promising route to diffraction-quality crystals and structures of membrane proteins. The microfluidic approach reported here eliminates two bottlenecks of the standard mesophase-based crystallization protocols: (i) manual preparation of viscous mesophases and (ii) manual harvesting of often small and fragile protein crystals. In the approach reported here, protein-loaded mesophases are formulated in an X-ray transparent microfluidic chip using only 60 nL of the protein solution per crystallization trial. The X-ray transparency of the chip enables diffraction data collection from multiple crystals residing in microfluidic wells, eliminating the normally required manual harvesting and mounting of individual crystals. We validated our appro

SUBMITTER: Khvostichenko DS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4181584 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature