SBIR Phase II: High-Throughput In-Situ Crystallography Screening System

小型企业创新研究（SBIR）二期项目旨在开发一种高通量晶体学筛选系统，旨在加速和自动化结构研究中的晶体生长。x射线晶体学是测定生物大分子（包括蛋白质和核酸）分子结构的主要方法。然而，尽管晶体是分析固体结构的理想材料，但迄今为止，培养足够质量的晶体用于衍射研究一直是一项繁琐而费力的工作。因此，开发一个能够实现自动化、小型化和并行化的平台，以获得最佳质量的晶体，将是晶体学领域向前迈出的重要一步，并将加速结构研究。因此，这一领域的改进不仅会引起从事结构研究的学术科学家的兴趣，而且也会引起对药物及其靶标的结构关系感兴趣的制药研究人员的兴趣。

The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop a high throughput crystallography screening system aimed at accelerating and automating crystal growth for structural studies. X-ray crystallography is the primary method for determining the molecular structure of biological macromolecules, including proteins and nucleic acids. Yet, although crystals are an ideal material for analyzing the structure of solids, growing crystals of sufficient quality for diffraction studies has heretofore been a tedious and labor-intensive undertaking. Thus, the development of a platform that allows automation, miniaturization and parallelization for obtaining crystals of optimal quality would be a significant step forward in crystallography and would accelerate structural studies. An improvement in this area would therefore be of interest not only to academic scientists engaged in structural studies, but also to pharmaceutical researchers who are interested in the structural relationship of drugs and their targets.