Obtaining high-quality protein crystals is often the first crucial step – and CrystalsFirst excels in crystallization screening to enable those targets. We apply extensive expertise and robotics to screen a wide array of conditions, optimizing factors like pH, precipitants, and temperature to grow diffraction-quality crystals. Our scientists treat crystallization development akin to assay development – systematically refining conditions to produce not just one crystal, but hundreds of reproducible crystals suitable for high-throughput soaking and X-ray analysis. This rigorous approach to crystallization is part of our target enablement commitment, ensuring even difficult proteins yield the crystals needed for structural studies.
CrystalsFirst leverages advanced infrastructure at the synchrotron facilities across Europe to expedite data collection process. We can swiftly test and characterize crystals on high-intensity beamlines, compressing iteration cycles. Once reproducible crystals are obtained, we employ our SmartSoak® technology to rapidly obtain co-structures with fragments or lead molecules. The result is an efficient pipeline from protein sample to 3D structure. By investing effort up front in crystallization screening, we remove a major bottleneck in structure-guided drug discovery. Clients benefit from our proven track record in crystallizing drug targets and delivering the structural insights needed to fast-track hit discovery and lead optimization.