Scientific Instruments Division Press Releases

01 Sep 2005 - Farfield Announces Early-Stage Detection of Protein Crystallisation using DPI

X-ray crystallography provides probably the most important enabling technique for structural biology, but the crystallisation of proteins under study remains the major bottleneck in the technique. Whilst our understanding of crystal growth is well developed, there is a significant lack of techniques to investigate and so more fully understand crystal nucleation events. Without nucleation crystal growth cannot proceed.

Scientists at CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, UK and Farfield Sensors Limited, UK (hyperlink) have been able to demonstrate the use of Dual Polarisation Interferometry (DPI) to determine the earliest stages of the crystallisation of a protein ('nucleation'). The research has also revealed that it is possible to study the crystallisation of proteins that crystallise from precipitates; conditions under which nucleation proceeded; conditions under which crystal nucleation did not proceed and conditions in which the nucleation process took an extended period of time. These distinct conditions were clearly and uniquely identified. DPI therefore offers the potential to guide crystal growers in the search for crystallisation conditions, giving an indication of how to optimise these conditions and thus helping to remove a significant bottleneck in structural biology.

From preliminary data using the model protein lysozyme, the observation of the onset of crystallisation by DPI is consistent with molecular clusters of between 30 and 100 molecules, which can be considered to be the nucleation stage.

View our Application Note on Detection of Early-Stage Protein Crystallization using DPI (, 615KB)