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Publication Abstract from PubMed

Crystal harvesting has proven to be difficult to automate and remains the rate-limiting step for many structure-determination and high-throughput screening projects. This has resulted in crystals being prepared more rapidly than they can be harvested for X-ray data collection. Fourth-generation synchrotrons will support extraordinarily rapid rates of data acquisition, putting further pressure on the crystal-harvesting bottleneck. Here, a simple solution is reported in which crystals can be acoustically harvested from slightly modified MiTeGen In Situ-1 crystallization plates. This technique uses an acoustic pulse to eject each crystal out of its crystallization well, through a short air column and onto a micro-mesh (improving on previous work, which required separately grown crystals to be transferred before harvesting). Crystals can be individually harvested or can be serially combined with a chemical library such as a fragment library.

Using sound pulses to solve the crystal-harvesting bottleneck.,Samara YN, Brennan HM, McCarthy L, Bollard MT, Laspina D, Wlodek JM, Campos SL, Natarajan R, Gofron K, McSweeney S, Soares AS, Leroy L Acta Crystallogr D Struct Biol. 2018 Oct 1;74(Pt 10):986-999. doi:, 10.1107/S2059798318011506. Epub 2018 Oct 2. PMID:30289409^[1]

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.