Products: MicroRT™ Room Temperature Mounting System
The answer for high-throughput room-temperature diffraction screening and data collection. Go from a crystal in a drop to a crystal in the X-ray beam at room temperature in 2 minutes with 99% chance of success.
Nearly all X-ray data for structural genomics is collected at low temperatures. But what if your low-temperature diffraction quality is inadequate?
Room temperature measurements are essential to determine whether the cause is poor as-grown crystal quality, damage caused by ligand and/or cryoprotectant soaks, and/or damage caused by the flash cooling process itself.
Ideally, you'd like to collect a frame or two at room temperature to set a benchmark for measurements at cryo temperatures. But standard glass capillary mounting methods are just too painful. And if the crystal is good you can't easily retrieve it for low-temperature data collection.
Our patent-pending MicroRT™ system makes collecting data at room temperature as easy as at low temperatures, and allows you to collect room and low temperature data from the same crystal.
First, we've replaced the standard 10 μm wall glass capillaries with ultra-thin-wall transparent polyester tubing that produces 60% less background scatter. Second, we use a tubing diameter that's much larger than your crystal and MicroMount, and a base that both holds the MicroMount and captures the tubing.
To prepare a sample, just inject stabilizing liquid down into the tube towards its sealed end using a gel-loading pipette tip. Mount your crystal on a MicroMount and insert the MicroMount into the base in the usual way.
Then pull the tubing down over the crystal and mount and onto the base.
No more cutting, crushing and breaking. No more cracking and shattering crystals on sharp capillary edges. No more swishing crystals back and forth to position them. No more fiddling with wicks. No more wax. No more alignment problems caused by capillary/liquid lensing.
Once you've collected your room temperature frames, just pop off the tubing, plunge the MicroMount in your favorite liquid cryogen, and you're ready to collect a low-temperature data set. Or else soak your crystal in the next solution, pop the plastic tubing back on, and repeat until you've checked out each solution or step in your protocol.
The only disadvantage is that polyester tubing is somewhat gas permeable. You'll want to keep a good sized plug of liquid in the tube and to measure your crystals within a day of mounting to make sure they don't dehydrate. If you want to store the crystals for longer, you can replace the thin wall polyester tube with any 2 mm ID glass or thick-walled plastic tubing.
See our Technical Notes pages for tips on using the MicroRT system.
See our Goniometer Bases pages to order MicroRT compatible bases.