The screens each containing 96 of the 384 unique conditions that resulted in the highest hit rates in over 500,000 experiments.
Qiagen and the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG) will provide crystallographers with a new set of screens assembled from the analysis of over 500,000 high-throughput crystallization experiments performed at the JCSG.
The 384 conditions that provided the highest hit rates in initial screening were chosen to form the screens. The set of conditions, split into four screens of 96 unique conditions, was previously provided by Qiagen as a customized product and will be supplied to the wider market as the JCSG Core Suites I–IV.
Because there are no empirical rules governing under which conditions individual proteins will crystallize, the process of preparing samples to obtain diffraction quality crystals requires screening of a large amount of conditions. Once crystals are obtained, precise measurements of diffraction intensities from each crystal help scientists map the probable positions of the atoms within each protein molecule, and ultimately derive a 3-D structure.
