Biomolecular crystallization in microfluidic devices

TL;DR

This paper reviews microfluidic devices used for biomolecular crystallization, highlighting their materials, design, and how they enable precise control and analysis of nucleation, crystal growth, and phase isolation in nanoliter volumes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of microfluidic techniques for biomolecular crystallization, including device properties, handling methods, and fundamental insights into nucleation and phase behavior.

Findings

Microfluidic devices enable precise control of crystallization conditions.

Droplet-based microfluidics allows detailed study of nucleation kinetics.

Microfluidics facilitates crystal analysis with minimal manual handling.

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of microfluidic devices reported in the literature, used to develop methodologies for nucleation of biomolecules, with crystal size control, and for collecting thermodynamic and kinetic data. Part I is dedicated to the properties of microfluidic devices through materials used for their fabrication and for crystals analysis. Part II describes the variety of microfluidic devices available and how to handle them to produce flows, droplets and/or wells of micrometer size. These devices use crystallization methods inspired by batch processes and they are mainly used for protein crystallization. Part III focuses on fundamental properties of biomolecule crystallization determined using droplet-based microfluidics: nucleation kinetics, nucleation rate and effective interfacial energy crystal/solution. Part IV explains how the kinetic effect of confinement due to micrometer size, and so nanovolumes, leads to isolation of different phases. These latter are characterized by X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and methods to minimize manual handling of crystals for XRD are also presented, with appropriate equipment to store the crystals.