Growth of Diffraction-Quality Protein Crystals Using a Harvestable Microfluidic Device

Protein crystallization is the major bottleneck in the entire process of protein crystallography, and obtaining diffraction-quality crystals can be unpredictable and sometimes exceptionally difficult, requiring many rounds of high-throughput screening. Recently, a more time- and cost-saving strategy to use the commercially available microfluidic devices called Crystal Formers has emerged. Herein we show the application of such a device using a protein from Legionella pneumophila called LidL that is predicted to be involved in the ability to efficiently manipulate host cell trafficking events once internalized by the host cell. After setting up just one 96-channel Crystal Former tray, we were able to obtain a diffraction-quality crystal that diffracted to 2.76 Å. These results show that Crystal Formers can be used to screen and optimize crystals to directly produce crystals for structure determination.