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Robotic imaging
Once a crystallisation plate has been set up, it is put into one of two plate incubators (we have two Gallery™ 700s from Rigaku). One incubator is set to 20C, and the other to 8C. Each incubator can hold up to 500 crystallisation plates. Each incubator is linked to a Minstrel™ HT automated crystal imaging system (Rigaku), and plates are automatically moved from the incubator to the imager and back according to the schedule assigned to each plate.
The Minstrel™ HT uses a 5 megapixel Q-Imaging colour camera. There is a 10x zoom lens on the imager. By default the imager is set to a zoom level where the entire crystallisation subwell of the plate is imaged. This ensures that we don’t miss the edges of your drops.
After a plate is inspected, the images get transferred to a storage server, and thumbnails get generated for each image. The thumbnails are generated once an hour, so there may be a lag of up to an hour before the new images are seen through the web-portal.
By default, the crystallisation plates are inspected four times in the first week, (on setup, and on days 1, 3 and 5 after setup), twice in the second week (days 7 and 10) and once a week after that, for a total of 13 inspections. After the scheduled inspections are completed, the plates are held for collection at CSIRO.
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