The Automated Crystallography Pipelines at the EMBL HTX Facility in Grenoble

EMBL Grenoble operates the High Throughput Crystallization Laboratory (HTX Lab), a large-scale user facility offering high throughput crystallography services to users worldwide. The HTX lab has a strong focus in the development of new methods in macromolecular crystallography. Through the combination of a high throughput crystallization platform, the CrystalDirect technology for fully automated crystal mounting and cryocooling and the CRIMS software we have developed fully automated pipelines for macromolecular crystallography that can be remotely operated over the internet. These include a protein-to-structure pipeline for the determination of new structures, a pipeline for the rapid characterization of protein-ligand complexes in support of medicinal chemistry, and a large-scale, automated fragment screening pipeline enabling evaluation of libraries of over 1000 fragments. Here we describe how to access and use these resources.