Hi Mathews One of our customers, Bret Dillard at the University of Georgia, has had great success with one of our robots in a Bactron X anaerobic chamber.
In this case, Bret mainly used the microbatch-under-oil method, which works very well for anaerobic work: (1) the oil protects the sample and reduces exposure to oxygen, (2) the amount of work is far less because you can keep several degassed screens in the chamber to use many times with different protein samples. With vapor diffusion you will have to degass the solutions every for every few samples (if not every sample). Bret won our competition for this work last year. You can find his report at http://www.douglas.co.uk/news.htm, plus more info below Patrick _________________________________________ Douglas Instruments has announced the winner of the second round of its competition for the best new crystallization technique. Congratulations to Bret Dillard from the University of Georgia, for his winning entry, "Automatic Protein Crystallization in an Anaerobic Environment." Bret placed an Oryx1-6 robot in a Bactron X anaerobic chamber, and used mainly microbatch-under-oil crystallization to crystallize four proteins that are not stable in an environment with oxygen. He found that microbatch avoided the need for frequent degassing of solutions which reduced the work-load enormously. The oil also provided extra protection from oxidation. One of the proteins crystallized is rubrerythrin from the hyperthermophilic archaeon, Pyrococcus furiosus. The native protein contains iron, but is unstable in oxygen. A previously-reported structure was determined in the presence of oxygen, but the iron had been replaced by zinc. Using the anaerobic system, Bret has now obtained the native form containing iron. _________________________________________ On 2/23/07, Mathews, Irimpan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dear Friends, Sorry for the non CCP4 question. We are planning to purchase a small glove box to setup crystallization trays under anaerobic conditions. If you have used glove boxes for crystallization, would you please give me some idea? We are thinking of getting the 815 series from Plas-labs (link below). http://www.plas-labs.com/ Thank you very much, Mathews Ps: If others are interested, I will post a summary.
