Oxford Lab Technologies Crystal Shifter: Diamond Light Source, Paul Scherrer Institut, University of Dundee, Bayer, Nuvisan, Merck, Shanghai Accelerator, Sinap, Structural Genomics Consortium, University of Oxford

Crystal Shifter robot is an essential tool in drug discovery pharma and research labs for protein fragment screening - from experiment preparation to crystal mounting and beamline processing.

OLT Crystal Shifter devices contribute to the global fight against COVID-19

Diamond scientists were supported by OLT’s Crystal Shifter devices and software to solve a new structure of the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (M^Pro), and complete an XChem crystallographic fragment screen against it.

In just 72 hours, 600 optimized crystals have been harvested and analysed. Thousands of more crystals followed, on one day over 1,000 crystals have been harvested before lunch! Such high optimization and harvesting troughput was enabled by Oxford Lab Technologies’ Crystal Shifter devices and software. The harvesting results were directly fed to XChem’s analytical pipeline for further processing. Diamond’s daily data sets are made available freely to the global scientific community.

“By the 24^th of March, the initial 1500-crystal experiment was complete, and the results made publicly available… This was an exceptionally large screen which yielded a remarkably rich readout, with vast opportunities for fragment growing and merging.”
Diamond Light Source, XChem Lab

We are humbled our devices and software are helping scientists at Diamond and contributing to such an important global research effort.

Read more in Nature Communications 2020.

DESY – Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron
Germany’s largest accelerator centre

“Harvesting crystals from 96 well plates is always stressful, the drops are drying out quite fast while the crystal quality deteriorates with the same pace. Using the Crystal Shifter makes crystal fishing easier and more successful. The lifetime of each drop increases dramatically, allowing to fish more and better diffracting crystals. The built-in soaking protocols are very helpful for my project that is related to inhibitor screening. The software is user friendly and the fact that you can so easily document all your work is invaluable.”
Dr Spyros Chatziefthymiou, DESY MX