SBIR Phase I: Nanoengineered Epitaxial Surfaces for High Throughput Protein Crystallization

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目提出开发一种新型的纳米工程表面，以使蛋白质晶体外延成核。这些表面将大大加速大多数高通量结构基因组学工作。外延表面的基本概念是制备具有与蛋白质晶胞的尺寸和周期性相称的化学调制的表面。据推测，将蛋白质生长溶液暴露于异质成核剂表面上的某些组成周期性（5-100 nm）诱导形成蛋白质晶体的初始核的吸附蛋白质分子的有序层。由于对于给定的未知蛋白质，单位细胞事先是未知的，因此将异质成核剂制备为基于芯片的格式的组合文库，每单位芯片面积具有各种各样的调制。在这个第一阶段的建议，方法和技术将被开发，使一个更有效的调查的表面和蛋白质的目标，更好地确定的作用，表面诱导nucleation.The该项目的商业应用领域的生物研究和药物发现和开发。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a new type ofnanoengineered surface to epitaxially nucleate protein crystals. These surfaces should greatly accelerate most high throughput Structural Genomics efforts. The basic concept for the epitaxial surfaces is to prepare a surface that possesses chemical modulations commensurate in size and periodicity to protein unit cells. It is speculated that exposure of the protein growth solution to certain compositional periodicities (5-100 nm) on the surface of the heterogeneous nucleants induces an ordered layer of sorbed protein molecules which form the incipient nucleus of the protein crystal. Since for a given unknown protein the unit cell is not known in advance, the heterogeneous nucleants are prepared as a combinatorial library in a chip based format, with a wide variety of modulations per unit chip area. In this Phase I proposal, methods and techniques will be developed to allow a more efficient survey of surfaces and proteins with the goal of better defining the role of the surfaces in inducing nucleation.The commercial applications of this project are in the area of biological research and in drug discovery and development.