High-Throughput Crystallization Pipeline at the Crystallography Core Facility of the Institut Pasteur

Patrick Weber (1) , Cédric Pissis (1) , Rafael Navaza (1) , Ariel E Mechaly (1) , Frederick Saul (1) , Pedro Alzari (2) , Ahmed Haouz (1)

1 Cristallographie (Plateforme) - Crystallography (Platform)
2 Microb. Struc. (UMR_3528 / U-Pasteur_5) - Microbiologie structurale - Structural Microbiology

The availability of whole-genome sequence data, made possible by significant advances in DNA sequencing technology, led to the emergence of structural genomics projects in the late 1990s. These projects not only significantly increased the number of 3D structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank in the last two decades, but also influenced present crystallographic strategies by introducing automation and high-throughput approaches in the structure-determination pipeline. Today, dedicated crystallization facilities, many of which are open to the general user community, routinely set up and track thousands of crystallization screening trials per day. Here, we review the current methods for high-throughput crystallization and procedures to obtain crystals suitable for X-ray diffraction studies, and we describe the crystallization pipeline implemented in the medium-scale crystallography platform at the Institut Pasteur (Paris) as an example.

Mots clés: crystal optimization; high-throughput crystallization screening; macromolecular crystallography pipeline

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]; Biologie structurale [q-bio.BM]

Patrick Weber, Cédric Pissis, Rafael Navaza, Ariel E Mechaly, Frederick Saul, et al.. High-Throughput Crystallization Pipeline at the Crystallography Core Facility of the Institut Pasteur. Molecules, 2019, 24 (24), pp.4451. ⟨10.3390/molecules24244451⟩. ⟨pasteur-02872233⟩