ROCK MAKER®
One Software for Your Entire Protein Crystallization Workflow One protein crystallization software to manage the entire experimentation process, from design and dispense to image viewing and analysis. ROCK MAKER® is a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) that is there every step of the way, with powerful yet easy-to-use tools that help you get the results you need quickly.
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ROCK MAKER® provides users the ability to:
- Design and Manage Experiments with Ease
- Screen your proteins against sparse screens
- Screen Experiment Wizard makes experiment design a breeze - creating multiple screen experiments for one or more proteins takes less than a minute.
- Most commonly used screens come pre-loaded
- Unique barcodes allow you to track your experiments from dispensing to imaging and scoring
- Dynamically and Efficiently View & Score Images
- Images taken by ROCK IMAGER are collected by ROCK MAKER
- Measure crystals and add notes directly to the image itself
- Bring out details of your images using the leveling histogram optically zoom in with a Region of Interest (ROI).
- Navigate through and score your images using your keyboard and customizable scoring schemas
- View up to four drops simultaneously or compare different inspections of the same drop
- View images with multiple modes including slideshow & full-screen
- Automatically Score Your Drops with MARCO
- One bottleneck to protein crystallography is manually scoring those protein drop images, which is often very time-consuming and tedious.
- MARCO is now integrated in ROCK MAKER and can automatically score your drops with just a few clicks.
- Zero in on the Optimal Crystallization Conditions
- Perform a quick multidimensional optimization of various conditions, varying concentrations and pHs of the ingredients along rows, columns, and/or quadrants within a plate
- Yield protein crystals from conditions that initially do not look promising with Iterative Screen Optimization (ISO)
- Generate fully randomized optimization screens based on promising conditions of your choice
- Analyze Your Data to Improve Future Experiment Design
- Use Search and Filter to mine your data to uncover trends based on a variety of parameters, helping you to continue your research efforts and focus in on conditions likely to grow bigger and better crystals
- Create and manipulate charts to visualize your experiment results
- Print various experiment reports for your lab notebooks
Multi-Fluorescence Imaging of Protein Crystals
The unambiguous and reliable identification of biological crystals remains a major obstacle in crystallography, particularly in the critical stage of initial screening experiments. Crystallographers have often relied on the intrinsic fluorescence of aromatic amino acids, such as tryptophan, to differentiate between salt and protein crystals. In some cases, proteins have very few tryptophan amino acids, or none at all, making it impossible to use UV fluorescence for imaging. The addition of a fluorescent molecule to one’s protein enables the ability to do visible fluorescence imaging and acquire high contrast images in very short imaging times with no sample damage.
Lipid Cubic Phase: Drop Setting, Condition Screening and Imaging
Integral membrane proteins are arguably the most important class of proteins in terms of their role in cellular interactions and their associated significance in disease pathways. Lipidic Cubic Phase (LCP) has emerged as an effective medium for crystallizing membrane proteins. The current pace of adoption of LCP-based methods has increased substantially, in spite of the steep learning curve associated with their implementation. This application note will discuss the three major steps of LCP crystallization and how automation technology is significantly facilitating the use of this powerful methodology.
Design and manage protein crystallization experiments with ease
Watch this video to learn how ROCK MAKER is designed to provide a quick and easy solution for creating screen experiments for protein crystallization, enabling multiple screen experiments to be produced for one or more proteins in less than a minute.
Iterative screen optimization made easy with ROCK MAKER
Iterative screen optimization (ISO) is a highly automated optimization process that can help researchers yield protein crystals from conditions that initially do not look promising. The ROCK MAKER® Crystallization Software is designed to automatically generate experiments for each ISO step and adjust the precipitant concentration of each condition based on user scores, making the implemention of ISO into crystallization research fast and easy.
Advancements in protein crystallization and its future at FORMULATRIX
In this video, Mayank Aggarwal, Ph.D, Product Manager and Application Scientist at FORMULATRIX, highlights the advancements in automated high-throughput protein crystallization over the past decade at FORMULATRIX and discusses the future of the ROCK MAKER crystallization software.
