To accelerate cost-effective technology development and testing, SECSG formed a prototype PSI-2 Large-Scale Production Center that included a crystal-directed protein production team, termed “Crystallomics."

The objective of the pilot project was to use carefully selected technologies with an industrial production-oriented philosophy to build high-throughput capabilities in cloning, expression, protein purification and crystallization, which together with advanced high-throughput structure determination pipelines developed by the Crystallography Core and bioinformatics tools, form a prototype Production Center. In addition to Pyrococcus furiosus (Pfu), two new organisms, Shewanella oneidensis and Clostridium thermocellum, were added in the study. Soon after the start of the project we realized that we could operate this prototype production center cost-effectively; moreover, the technology is scalable to meet the challenges of high-throughput structure determination.

For example, in a recent visit to the SER-CAT beamline the UGA team determined 5 structures in 23 hours and 7 structures total on-site. This is a record for SER-CAT and possibly a world record in the effective use of synchrotron beamtime.

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