What happens during a typical month in the screening laboratory?
Email notification and sample tracking: An email is sent out to the community of structural biologists who have expressed an interest in submitting a sample(s) to the screening laboratory. This email notifies the community on a monthly basis that screening will take place so that interested researchers can enter the queue. The users contact the laboratory to reserve a plate for screening experiments. When the queue is full, a notification is sent out to the community to notify them of this fact. Preparation of the experiment plates with oil and cocktail: Meanwhile, in the laboratory, research associates use two Matrix TangoTM liquid-handling systems (equipped with a 384-syringe bank head) to aspirate USP grade mineral oil from a single-well source plate and dispense 5 microliters of the oil into each well of a 1536-well microassay plate purchased from Greiner BioOne (catalog number 790801). This plate will contain the crystallization experiments. Cocktail solutions are aspirated from f
