Dynamic and static light scattering

Interested to know about the solution properties of your crystal?

Bio21-C³ has two Zetasizer Nano ZS (Malvern Instruments, UK) instruments – one situated at St Vincent's Institute and the other at the Burnet Institute. You may book time on either of these instruments.

There is a well known correlation between the monodispersity of a protein sample and likely crystallisation success. It follows that trialing polydisperse samples in a crystallisation robot would be likely a waste of time and a waste of precious protein.

Compared to older DLS technologies, the Zetasizer Nano ZS is very sensitive, capable of handling low microlitre volumes of sample with almost complete sample recovery and is extremely quick, taking only a few minutes per sample. In many respects, DLS data is now as easy to obtain as a conventional UV spectrophotometric reading, and is much more informative about the potential for a sample to yield crystals.

DLS measurements is used by all users of the facility for QC or prescreening of samples prior to entering crystallisation trials as well as improving any initial crystals obtained. For example, dispersants and additives can be systematically optimised to produce monodisperse solutions of proteins that are much more likely to yield crystals compared to samples containing aggregates. The DLS based approach will further improve the outcomes of the high throughput crystallisation experiments.