ChipX: A Novel Microfluidic Chip for Counter-Diffusion Crystallization of Biomolecules and in Situ Crystal Analysis at Room Temperature

Microfluidic technology has opened new possibilities for the crystallization of biological macromolecules during the past decade. Microfluidic systems offer numerous advantages over conventional crystal growth methods. They enable easy handling of nanovolumes of solutions, extreme miniaturization, and parallelization of crystallization assays, especially for high-throughput screening applications. Our goal was to design a versatile, low cost, and easy-to-use crystallization chip based on counter-diffusion that is compatible with on-chip crystallographic characterization. The ChipX is a microfluidic chip made of cyclic olefin copolymer. It was used to grow crystals of biomolecules and perform complete X-ray diffraction analyses on synchrotron sources. Our results demonstrate that accurate crystallographic data can be collected at room temperature directly from ChipX microfluidic devices for both experimental single-wavelength anomalous dispersion phasing and structure refinement.