Protein Crystallization in Droplet-based Microsystems

The central focus of protein crystallization has been on the production of high quality (large well diffracting) protein crystals for protein structure determination by X-ray crystallography, being a complex and multiparametric process. The successful crystallization of a protein is determined both by thermodynamic and kinetic considerations, involving the optimization of several variables. In this context, the main goal of this work is to improve our understanding of protein crystallization, namely study the influence of some parameters on the process. For this, we propose a more rational screening strategy to the traditional trial-and-error approach. The latter is based in the use of phase diagrams at an early stage to analyse protein solubility. Further, an easy-to-use and cheap droplet-based microreactor will be explored to perform multiple protein crystallization trials. In fact, microreactors have been reported to provide a unique platform for investigating fundamental protein crystallization mechanisms, since they permit a large number of experiments under identical conditions, using small quantities of samples.