Practical implementations for improving the throughput in a manual crystallization setup

For the past few years, the number of structural genomics projects has been growing enormously worldwide. All these projects are supported by substantial financial resources and therefore are able to employ robotics for setting up high-throughput platforms. This paper addresses a simple question: how can basic research laboratories draw profit from the efforts and innovations that have been made to establish high-throughput facilities? To answer this question, the implementations that have been made in the authors' laboratory to improve manual crystallization setup with very limited financial investments are presented. In combination with 96-well microplates, an advanced protocol has been introduced and several simple devices have been designed to speed up different aspects of the manual crystallization setup, from storage of solutions to the setting of drops. These implementations lead to the reduction of costs in terms of time and money without any loss of quality. In addition, the crystallization throughput in the manual setup has been significantly increased.