Development of Control Applications for High-Throughput Protein Crystallography Experiments

An integrated client-server control system (PCCS) with a unified relational database (PCDB) has been developed for high-throughput protein crystallography experiments on synchrotron beamlines. The major steps in protein crystallographic experiments (purification, crystallization, crystal harvesting, data collection, and data processing) are integrated into the software. All information necessary for performing protein crystallography experiments is stored in the PCDB database (except raw X-ray diffraction data, which is stored in the Network File Server). To allow all members of a protein crystallography group to participate in experiments, the system was developed as a multi-user system with secure network access based on TCP/IP secure UNIX sockets. Secure remote access to the system is possible from any operating system with X-terminal and SSH/X11 (Secure Shell with graphical user interface) support. Currently, the system covers the high-throughput X-ray data collection stages and is being commissioned at BL5A and NW12A (PF, PF-AR, KEK, Tsukuba, Japan).