ChipX: A Novel Microfluidic Chip for Counter-Diffusion Crystallization of Biomolecules and in Situ Crystal Analysis at Room Temperature

Microfluidic technology has opened new possibilities for the crystallization of biological macromolecules during the past decade. Microfluidic systems offer numerous advantages over conventional crystal growth methods. They enable easy handling of nanovolumes of solutions, extreme miniaturization, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Crystal growth & design 2013-08, Vol.13 (8), p.3333-3340
Main Authors: Pinker, Franziska, Brun, Mathieu, Morin, Pierre, Deman, Anne-Laure, Chateaux, Jean-François, Oliéric, Vincent, Stirnimann, Christian, Lorber, Bernard, Terrier, Nicolas, Ferrigno, Rosaria, Sauter, Claude
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Condensed matter: structure, mechanical and thermal properties
Diffusion in solids
Engineering Sciences
Equations of state, phase equilibria, and phase transitions
Exact sciences and technology
Micro and nanotechnologies
Microelectronics
Physics
Solid-solid transitions
Specific phase transitions
Structure of solids and liquids
crystallography
Structure of specific crystalline solids
Transport properties of condensed matter (nonelectronic)
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Summary:Microfluidic technology has opened new possibilities for the crystallization of biological macromolecules during the past decade. Microfluidic systems offer numerous advantages over conventional crystal growth methods. They enable easy handling of nanovolumes of solutions, extreme miniaturization, and parallelization of crystallization assays, especially for high-throughput screening applications. Our goal was to design a versatile, low cost, and easy-to-use crystallization chip based on counter-diffusion that is compatible with on-chip crystallographic characterization. The ChipX is a microfluidic chip made of cyclic olefin copolymer. It was used to grow crystals of biomolecules and perform complete X-ray diffraction analyses on synchrotron sources. Our results demonstrate that accurate crystallographic data can be collected at room temperature directly from ChipX microfluidic devices for both experimental single-wavelength anomalous dispersion phasing and structure refinement.
ISSN:1528-7483
1528-7505
DOI:10.1021/cg301757g