H is for high brightness

Sue Byram, Business Manager for crystallography and Dan Frankel, Product Manager for life sciences business development at Bruker AXS talk to proteincrystallography.com about their latest protein crystallography products.

Sue, can you tell us about the Ultra-Bright X-Ray Source?

[SUE] This is called a MICROSTAR-H, H for high brightness. The MICROSTAR is a micro-focus rotating anode generator with a very high power loading and a very small spot size. That is something that we announced within the last 2 years, and then this is the newest flavor, newest high brightness version of it.

It has got a special set of optics on it that we call HELIOS optics, HELIOS for bright as the sun, and these are about 3 times the intensity of the previous generation of optics / generator combination. The idea is that with the very small protein crystals you should be able to screen in the home lab and see diffraction that you would not otherwise see on older generation sources and optics, and that you should also be able to collect very high quality data in the home lab.

We have a collaboration with George Sheldrick at the University of Goettingen who is one of our scientific advisors, and George is busily developing software for home lab structure solution of proteins by single wavelength SAD phasing using atoms as light as sulfur. So for example, you would collect a high quality, high redundancy data set on copper on a system like this, and then be able to solve your structure at home for the obvious reasons that your crystal may not travel or your people may find it either inconvenient or expensive to travel.

The people who have stopped by to enquire about MICROSTAR-H, what have they found most exciting about it?

The intensity. I mean that is what it is all about, to be able to handle the much smaller crystals. So I would say high brightness, that fact that it handles smaller crystals, and the better quality of data. The automation systems that we have with it are already out in the field, so that is not a novelty at this point.

What made you decide to develop this new product?

It's definitely a core technology for Bruker, for the source technology this was a strategic decision we made many years ago. We had always been developing 2-dimensional detectors for protein crystallography and we had introduced those in the 80s, and we had continued on these lines. So that was always a core technology for us, but we saw clearly that it was going to be important to have full systems for the home lab. So we acquired both Nonius in Delft and the Mac Science group in Japan, so 2 of the world’s 3 rotating anode generator technologies are now under the Bruker umbrella. So that is something that we have chosen to really put a lot of internal development effort into, and that is a continuing process which resulted first in this MICROSTAR generation, and now in the MICROSTAR-H generation.

Dan, can you tell us about the Crystal Farm™?

[Dan] About a year and a half ago we signed an agreement or we got involved with a company out of California, Discovery Partners International (DPI), to sell market and service their Crystal Farm™ product which was a larger scale product geared for higher throughput labs. We have had very good success with it and so we developed a bench-top model so we would have accessibility to smaller labs or smaller research environments. It uses the same technology as the larger one, but makes it more accessible for smaller, lower throughput labs.
What are the main advantages of this product?

The Crystal Farm™ is a new area of automation in this field. Protein crystal growth before was mostly done by hand and by sitting, by eye looking through a microscope watching for crystals to grow. In automating this process we are able to better control it and a number of our users have actually said that they are getting better crystals faster.

DPI is fully behind this product, they went and developed this thing, they are really the engineering arm of this product and they seem pretty happy with us. We have got a multi-year agreement with them and we are going to continue to collaborate with them.

Sue, how are you planning on moving forward within the protein crystallography area?

[Sue]We have a whole portfolio of developments that we are doing, and that was one of the, I think, most interesting things about becoming part of Bruker. We were the Siemens X-Ray instruments group before, and when Bruker acquired the whole worldwide X-Ray Group, the one thing they immediately said was “You are not putting enough percentage of your sales into R&D”.

We were working more under an electronics type of feeling with the worldwide big Siemens Company, and so the first thing they said was to start accelerating our R&D program and we have been doing that for many years now. Seeing the results of some of these; so we have got developments that really span the whole areas of – and not in any particular order – X-Ray sources, we just talked about the MICROSTAR-H X-Ray optics, we have our own company, Incoatec, in Germany which is a spin-off from the GKSS Research Organization, that makes many kinds of optics for both the protein crystallography sources and also powder diffraction and fluorescence optics, many many customized versions of that so I think you can anticipate seeing different kinds of and different flavors of optics for different applications.

Detectors are a core technology for us, goniometers and mechanical orientation sample mounts, automated sample handling such as the BruNo robotics we continue to evolve for the ease of use and for the efficiency of automating things. We developed a 3 micro-motor goniometer head that could move the crystal automatically into the X-Ray beam and that is coupled, of course, with our BruNo automation system, but that is something that can also be used stand-alone from BruNo so that you can sit at the screen and click your loop into position rather than manually move the crystal there. Some of the students in particular are perhaps uncomfortable or even somewhat afraid in centering those crystals. It might be more comfortable for them to work with the computer screen.

Low temperature devices; we continue to need ways to cool the crystal sample itself. Software development is absolutely key and we are coming out with new algorithms for solving and handling difficult problems. Ease of use and automation is a key component, of course, in the world of structural genomics.

We also have quite a lot of synergy with Bruker BioSpin on the NMR side in the structural genomics field in particular. We see more and more of this partnership of protein crystallography with NMR, so if you can't crystallize the protein, then NMR methods may be convenient or you want to model what is happening in solution verses what is in the solid state, so we have ways that we can work together with those instruments and share knowledge. So you will see more developments in that arena as well.

Further Information: http://www.bruker-axs.de