Automated mounting, centering and screening of crystals for high-throughput protein crystallography

A fully automated system for screening protein crystals for X-ray diffraction analysis has been designed and is being installed on the beamline BW6 at DORIS in Hamburg, Germany. The system includes robotic mounting of flash-frozen crystals from a storage dewar, centering and alignment of the sample both by optical and Xray (scattering and fluorescence) techniques, assessment of the diffraction quality of the sample, and SAD/MAD or nonconventional diffraction data acquisition with high-throughput data rates. The system covers all experimental steps required for protein x-ray structure analysis and provides a powerful means for structural genomics projects.