Automated screening of 2D crystallization trials using transmission electron microscopy: a high-throughput tool-chain for sample preparation and microscopic analysis.

We have built and extensively tested a tool-chain to prepare and screen two-dimensional crystals of membrane proteins by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) at room temperature. This automated process is an extension of a new procedure described recently that allows membrane protein 2D crystallization in parallel (Iacovache et al., 2010).

Automatic TEM image analysis of membranes for 2D crystal detection.

TEM image processing tools are devised for the assessment of 2D-crystallization experiments. The algorithms search for the presence and assess the quality of crystalline membranes. The retained scenario emulates the decisions of a microscopist in selecting targets and assessing the sample.

Visually guided movements: learning with modular neural maps in robotics.

Robotics involves complex processing and requires modular controllers. For the connectionist approach, the adaptation of each module within the global system remains a major problem to be solved. This paper proposes the idea that biological learning can take advantage of the structures of the modules and the nature of modular decomposition.