Development of Auto-Mounting System for Screening Protein Crystals.

We are developing a robotic system for auto-mounting protein crystals from a sample cassette in liquid nitrogen to a goniometer head. A small industrial six joint axis robot is adopted for this system with a custom built actuator. It will be installed at a wiggler protein crystallography beam-line in Pohang Accelerator Laboratory. Our design goal is to make the system applied to every type of sample pins such as a screw or magnetic types of pins with 18mm length. The sample cassette is designed to contain 10 crystals, which is similar to ALS and ACTOR systems. The diameter of a hole is 17 mm for several type caps. It’s bigger than others. A sample Dewar with two type sensors for monitoring liquid nitrogen level can contain 5 cassettes at a time. We designed two types of actuator for holding the cap containing a protein crystal. These whole hardware and software are under development in PAL. Our system and some test results will be introduced in this paper. © 2007 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]