This past week, DeNovX conducted site visits, technology updates, and data collection with its strategic partners at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory and at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. DeNovX is developing a reproducible high throughput synchrotron powder X-ray diffraction workflow to support pharmaceutical development under a Phase II SBIR grant from the National Institutes of Health. The interdisciplinary team comprising chemists, physicists, engineers, and crystallographers has progressed through prototyping, reproducibility studies, and rigorous method qualification studies and is now demonstrating benefits that include rapid data collection requiring a fraction of the [...]

Thanks to an NIH Phase I SBIR award, DeNovX is expanding its collaboration with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory’s Biosciences Division to enhance protein crystal production for the Advanced Photon Source. Serial macromolecular crystallography for protein structure determination permits data collection on small and/or radiation sensitive crystals at room temperature using highly intense X-rays. Serial crystallography is increasingly used in structural biology, and DeNovX is focused on integrating the company’s engineered nucleation feature products into crystallization pipelines to generate more protein crystals at a faster rate in support of structure-based drug design.

Thanks to a longstanding collaboration with Argonne’s Midwest Center for Structural Genomics and the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases, the crystal structure of a siderophore binding protein FatB from Desulfitobacterium hafniense has been determined and deposited with the Protein Data Bank (7SF6). This protein was crystallized in the DeNovX laboratories during quantitative crystallization studies and multiple diffraction quality crystals were reproducibly formed on select engineered nucleation features while the control studies produced just a few poorly diffracting crystals. This novel crystallization and structure determination adds to the list of benefits of using DeNovX’s engineered nucleation features that include [...]