Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica

This facility utilizes an automatic liquid dispenser (Phoenix RE, RIGAKU) for sub-microliter scale crystallization screening to identify suitable conditions. This equipment is equipped with a micro-needle for rapid dispensing of protein samples and an additional 96 needles for rapid dispensing of crystallization conditions into the crystallization plate. Each plate can screen 96 conditions. In addition, this facility also provides crystallization plates and conditions for users to manually perform crystal screening.

This facility provides incubators (CN25，MITSUBISHI) with different temperatures ranging from 4-40℃ for crystal growth. These incubators have stable temperatures and extremely low vibrations, making them suitable for placing various 96-well crystallization plates. Users who set up crystallization plates through our automatic or manual crystallization screening service will enjoy three months of free placement of their plates in the incubators.

This facility currently has a number of optical microscopes, such as MZ95 (LEICA), MZ16 (LEICA) and M205C (LEICA), available for users to observe crystals with high-quality imaging, free of charge. These microscopes can obtain both polarized and white light images in the same field of view, with magnification up to 64, 160, and 320 times respectively, and offer both bright field and simple dark field illumination. Additionally, each microscope is equipped with a Canon digital camera for easy image capture.

This facility is equipped with a UV-imaging system (CrysCam UV, Art Robbins) to assist users in determining whether their crystals are composed of protein.

This facility provides users with reagents, relevant consumables and technical supports for crystal optimization and soaking and co-crystallization with small molecule compounds.

This facility provides various stock solutions for preparation and refinement of crystallization conditions

This facility is equipped with an automatic sampling system (Scorpion, ARI), which is a single-channel pipettor capable of performing any experiment that a handheld pipettor can do, with higher speed, reliability, and precision.

This facility supports the shipping of pre-frozen protein crystals to the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, Hsinchu, for crystal testing and full X-ray data collection.

This facility provides users with services and consultation related to crystal structure determination, model building, refinement and validation. It also supports model building against cryo-EM data.

This facility provides users with services and consultation related to homology modeling, molecular docking and simulation.