X-ray Facility instrumentation

TECAN: Freedom EVO 100 (by Tecan Group Ltd) Liquid Handling Platform – creation of customised crystallisation screens and dispensation of commercial crystallisation kits into a variety of crystallisation plates.

MOSQUITO: MOSQUITO CRYSTAL (by TTPLabtech Ltd.) Protein Crystallisation System – high-speed liquid dispensing system for automated setup of macromolecular crystallisation trials. Uses disposable pipette tips. Video.

DRAGONFLY: DRAGONFLY (by TTPLabtech Ltd.) Screen optimiser – enables complex assay gradients or optimisation screens to be rapidly and accurately prepared, even with viscous liquids, while illuminating cross-contamination. Video.

ROCK IMAGER250 (by Formulatrix, Inc) is an automated imaging system for protein crystallisation. Incubates and captures high quality images of up to 250 microplates on a user-defined schedule. The system also includes the UV modification allowing users to easily discover which crystals are salt and which are protein.

CRYSTAL SHIFTER: The crystal shifter (by Oxford labtech) is a instrument is an x-y stage for microscope with computer software that automates everyday tasks in protein fragment screening and improves quality of experiments.

OpentronsFlex: Opentrons Flex is a liquid-handling robot designed for high throughput and complex workflows. The Flex robot is the base of a modular system that includes pipettes, a labware gripper, on-deck modules, and labware — all of which you can swap out yourself. Flex is designed with a touchscreen so you can work with it directly at the lab bench, or you can control it from across your lab with the Opentrons App or our open-source APIs

Other Crystallisation Equipment:

Centeo TG40 System (by Centeo Biosciences) – designed to enable temperature optimisation for vapour phase diffusion protein crystallisation experiments. The Facility currently has 5 of those systems.

A number of various stereo microscopes including two newly acquired SZX16 (by Olympus Ltd) are available for the Facility users. One of the key features of SZX16 includes the use of white LED illumination with average lifetime of 12,800 hours.