Reports

Streak Seeding Automation Using Silicon Tools

Georgiev, Atanas; Vorobiev, Sergeui M.; Edstrom, William; Song, Ting; Laine, Andrew F.; Hunt, John F.; Allen, Peter K.

This report presents an approach to automation of a protein crystallography task called streak seeding. The approach is based on novel and unique custom-designed silicon microtools, which we experimentally verified to produce results similar to the results from traditionally used boar bristles. The advantage to using silicon is that it allows the employment of state-of-the-art micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) technology to produce microtools of various shapes and sizes and that it is rigid and can be easily adopted as an accurately calibrated end-effector on a microrobotic system. A working prototype of an automatic streak seeding system is presented, which has been successfully applied for protein crystallization.

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Academic Units
Computer Science
Publisher
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University
Series
Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, CUCS-015-06
Published Here
April 26, 2011