Automated Particle Collection for Protein Crystal Harvesting

Abstract

A robust automated system to collect protein crystals for X-ray crystallography is presented. This system uses an ultra violet imaging system based on commercial off the shelf components, a magnetically manipulated tool, and a resilient behavior-based controller. The system is validated by collecting over 350 polystyrene beads, used as crystal emulators, and transporting them 2mm to a predefined goal in a 14 hour period without human intervention. The average time to identify, collect, transport, and deliver a crystal emulator is 2.4 minutes, similar to an expert operator. This is the first demonstration of a completely automated robust system for protein crystal harvesting.

Untethered Small-Scale Machines for Microrobotic Manipulation: From Individual and Multiple to Collective Machines

“…(C) Automated protein crystal harvesting. Reproduced with permission from ref . Copyright 2017 IEEE.…”

“…Automated multi-agent manipulation represents the next level of manipulation. A magnetic rolling bot can trap, transport, and drop objects by fluidic interaction . To perform automated harvesting of numerous objects and avoid repetitive manipulation, a reactive planner is proposed with a dynamic planning and control scheme, which is different from the planning for the entire manipulation process (Figure A, B).…”

Using sound pulses to solve the crystal-harvesting bottleneck

“…In cases where room-temperature diffraction data are advantageous, microfluidic traps (Lyubimov et al, 2015) or silicon chips (Owen et al, 2017) can leverage one harvest step into many diffraction experiments. Recently, an automated magnetic manipulator-based crystalharvesting system with a duty cycle of 2.4 min per specimen was described (Zeydan et al, 2017). This harvesting time per crystal is comparable to photo-ablation harvesting (Zander et al, 2016) and robotic harvesting (Viola, Carman, Walsh, Miller et al, 2007).…”

Autonomous Microrobotic Manipulation Using Visual Servo Control

“…It is worth noting that none of these works demonstrate a complete sequence of manipulation, closed-loop positioning, and release of a manipuland or microobject. We use a behavior-based planner [27] similar to that described in [28] and [29], in which we have decomposed the manipulation task into multiple stages. Similar to the microassembly work in [30], the phases are part of a heuristic control strategy defined by robot positions relative to intermediate goal and failure regions.…”