ActiveSight operates a 10,500 square foot laboratory/office facility complete with the state-of-the art equipment for structure-based drug design. Backed by Rigaku Americas Corporation, we are fully equipped for high-throughput crystallography and fragment-based screening.

Molecular Biology and Protein Production

Our clients benefit from ActiveSight's wide variety of cloning and expression systems which have been optimized by an experienced team of scientists. ActiveSight's laboratory enables rapid cloning and protein production in both E. coli and Baculoviral expression systems. By coupling expression to rapid purification, we increase the chances of protein crystallization. ActiveSight has cloned, expressed and crystallized cysteine and aspartic acid proteases, Nuclear Hormone Receptors, DNA-binding proteins, and kinases for our clients and in-house projects.

Protein Crystallization: Powered by Rigaku Automation Group

ActiveSight facilities feature Rigaku's CrystalMation/Minstrel HT plate incubation and imaging system. Rigaku's CrystalMation is a fully integrated platform for protein crystallization, automating every step from custom screen making to crystallization trial imaging and analysis. CrystalMation consists of crystallization screen creation, plate setup, reservoir and protein dispense, plate storage and handling, image inspection and scoring, one-click optimization and software applications for experiment management, streamlines the crystallization process. Such throughput, along with the smaller volumes afforded by the use of robotics, makes sampling of larger and finer crystallization space possible.

The Minstrel HT system from Rigaku automatically images crystallization experiments and links images with crystallization conditions. The Minstrel HT provides unattended image acquisition, providing an objective history of the experiment. A fully integrated system for temperature controlled incubation, inspection, and analysis of protein crystallization plates, each installation is comprised of one Minstrel HT imaging station and either one or two Gallery^TM 700 Incubator storage systems.

X-ray Diffraction: Powered by Rigaku Americas Corp.

ActiveSight utilizes Rigaku's Ultimate HomeLab for data collection. The ActiveSight diffraction equipment includes the FR-E SuperBright X-ray generator, the Saturn 92 CCD and R-AXIS IV++ imaging plate detectors, the ACTOR automated crystal transport, and the X-stream^TM 2000 low temperature system. The FR-E SuperBright X-ray source matches the power of bending magnet synchrotrons, allowing rapid data collection on a home source.

The ACTOR™ automated crystal transport system facilitates the fully automated, rapid collection of multiple data sets. Automation at every stage leads to faster turnaround times for structural projects, but it also can result in a significant increase in the resolution of crystal structures, because more conditions can be tested rapidly and in parallel.