The crystallization of membrane proteins in amphiphile-rich materials such as lipidic cubic phases is an established methodology in many structural biology laboratories. The standard procedure employed with this methodology requires the generation of a highly viscous lipidic material by mixing lipid, for instance monoolein, with a solution of the detergent solubilized membrane protein. This pre...

Conducting polymers are interesting materials of technological applications, while the use of polymers as additives controlling crystal nucleation and growth is a fast growing research field. In the present article, we make a first step in combining both topics and report the effect of conducting polymer derivatives, which are based on carboxylated polyanilines (c-PANIs), on in vitro CaCO3 crys...

Microporous Calcium Titanium Phosphate glass-ceramics have many uses in high-tech industries. For example, they have applications in catalysts industry. In this study, different molar percentages of alumina were added to a glass with P2O5 30, CaO 45, TiO2 25 (mol%) composition. The samples were melted at 1350°C and crystallization heat treatment was performed on...

A simple semi-automated microseeding procedure for nanolitre crystallization experiments is described. Firstly, a microseed stock solution is made from microcrystals using a Teflon bead. A dilution series of this microseed stock is then prepared and dispensed as 100 nl droplets into 96-well crystallization plates, facilitating the incorporation of seeding into high-throughput crystallization pi...

Microbatch crystallization under oil is a powerful procedure for obtaining protein crystals. Using this method, aqueous protein solutions are dispensed under liquid oil, and water evaporates through the layer of oil, with a concomitant increase in the concentrations of both protein and precipitant until the nucleation point is reached. A technique is presented for regulating the rate of water e...

We present a parallel simulated annealing algorithm for crystallization of N-body systems. The implementation uses systolic simulated annealing with additional parallel cost function evaluation. We have a hybrid topology which consists of a systolic ring and attached to each ring processor a tree of processors. Our research topic is crystallization of particles on a spherical surface. Some resu...

Effects of thermal transitions (glass transition, crystallization), water, and glycerol on invertase activity in freeze-dried carbohydrate systems were investigated. Efficacy of κ-carrageenan to delay sugar crystallization in freeze-dried carbohydrate systems was also studied. Water sorption properties and glass transition temperatures, Tg, were determined for freeze-dried carbohydrate-sucrose ...

The crystallization of a new macromolecule is still very much a trial-and-error process. As is well known, it requires the search of a large parameter space of experimental settings to find the relatively few idiosyncratic conditions that lead to diffraction-quality crystals. Crystallographers have developed a variety of screens to help identify initial crystallization conditions, including tho...