Miniaturization of the Whole Process of Protein Crystallographic Analysis by a Microfluidic Droplet Robot: From Nanoliter-Scale Purified Proteins to Diffraction-Quality Crystals.

To obtain diffraction-quality crystals is one of the largest barriers to analyze the protein structure using X-ray crystallography. Here we describe a microfluidic droplet robot that enables successful miniaturization of the whole process of crystallization experiments including large-scale initial crystallization screening, crystallization optimization, and crystal harvesting. The combination of the state-of-the-art droplet-based microfluidic technique with the microbatch crystallization mode dramatically reduces the volumes of droplet crystallization reactors to tens nanoliter range, allowing large-scale initial screening of 1536 crystallization conditions and multifactor crystallization condition optimization with extremely low protein consumption, and on-chip harvesting of diffraction-quality crystals directly from the droplet reactors.