Joseph Luft and George DeTitta have received a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for their project “Enabling Technologies to Macromolecular Crystallization”.  This four-year award, which started May 1, 2011, provides $2.1M in support for the Hauptman-Woodward Institute’s High-Throughput Crystallization Screening Laboratory (HTSlab).

HTSlab is the outgrowth of ten years of development of macromolecular crystallization technology at HWI.  Since February 2000, the HTSlab has investigated the crystallization properties of 13,000 individual proteins.  This work is currently continuing in partnership with more than 1,000 investigators in the structural biology community as well as one of the four large-scale structure determination centers funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Protein Structure Initiative.

The lab aims to screen crystallization conditions for as many as 1,200 proteins per year with technologies for high-throughput crystal optimization applied to a subset of these proteins.