Crystallography

mosquito‘s ability to miniaturise assays or protein crystallography set-ups allows smaller volumes of precious sample to be used with no risk of cross-contamination, resulting in savings on expensive reagents.

Protein crystallography

mosquito makes protein crystallography screening faster, more cost-effective and quite simply easier than ever before. mosquito Crystal automates high density 96-well hanging drop plate preparation, as well as sitting drop, microbatch and seeding or additive screening, with no need to make setup changes to the instrument.

mosquito’s accuracy and repeatability means drops are placed centrally in the sub-wells of sitting-drop plates, minimising problems with drops being distorted by the well walls or drops not coinciding. Precise drop placement facilitates automated analysis, as the area of interest can be much smaller, thus making crystals easier to identify.

mosquito Crystal can create several multi-component drops per well, even in 96-well hanging drop set-ups. This allows different samples, constructs, complexes, volume ratios or protein concentrations to be assessed at the same time. mosquito is unique in its ability to perform multiple aspirations before a single dispense, which is essential to automating additive screening. A combination of solutions can be dispensed simultaneously – with additional mixing if required – resulting in perfect drop formation with no protein evaporation.

Lipid Cubic Phase (LCP) Screening

mosquito LCP enables both LCP and traditional crystallisation experiments to be set up in any commerically available plate. This instrument uses a positive displacement syringe for accurate and repeatable dispensing of the LCP down to 25 nL.  Furthermore, mosquito LCP automatically measures and calibrates the position of the LCP syringe needle tip to within ± 20 µm to facilitate precise drop placement and subsequent automated imaging of membrane protein drops and crystals. With high throughputs of at least 8 plates an hour, evaporation loss of LCP is minimised. mosquito LCP uses the proven positive displacement mosquito tips for screen additions which offer our standard guarantee of zero cross contamination.