Many still think of ZoBio as an NMR company. And while NMR will always have a special place in our hearts, we also have a thriving crystallography team!

Detailed and timely structural information is a cornerstone of rational drug design and X-ray crystallography plays a key role in most structure-based approaches.  A year ago, we completed a strategic investment in building a robust X-ray crystallography workflow and our protein crystallography capabilities have now matured into a fully integrated, High-Throughput (HT) platform, thanks to in-house developments and customizations that augment our industry standard instrumentation.

Our infrastructure supports HT ligand soaking and co-crystallization protocols and both have been used with great success. A custom-made climate chamber with both temperature and humidity control ensures maximum reproducibility of crystallization and allows us to reliably harvest even very small or thin crystals without degradation or dehydration. This instrumentation ensures precise and highly reproducible experiments for the most sensitive proteins and crystals.

Once a robust crystallization system is established, our proprietary in-house algorithms allow us to soak 96-samples in a matter of minutes enabling screening of very large numbers of compounds. This compound screening capacity is complemented by frequent scheduled visits to synchrotrons and our automated data processing pipeline based around the PanDDA multi-dataset analysis package which further enables timely structural information with great sensitivity.

Striking a balance between automation and customization, our crystallography platform has supported over 15 integrated drug discovery projects in the last year, both on unprecedented and on previously described targets, using soaking and co-crystallization approaches, enabling SBDD for reversible and covalent small molecules alike. Finally, the tight integration of our structural biologists with our protein production group has allowed us to engineer proteins that yield crystals of highly validated targets that have previously been refractory to 3D structure elucidation.

Our entire pipeline is highly customizable allowing us to easily meet our client’s needs and target’s demands – with the usual creativity we are known for.