Instruct ULTRA

ULTRA-funded project advances data transfer between protein crystallography experiments at the homelab and synchrotron

At the second joint MXCuBE/ISPyB meeting at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, Prof Rik Wierenga from the Faculty of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine (FBMM) at the University of Oulu, presented an update on a new data-transfer protocol to coordinate protein crystallography experiments at the homelab and synchrotron, which has been developed with funding from the Instruct-ULTRA project.

In 2018, the University of Oulu was awarded funding from Instruct-ULTRA, under the first project call of Work Package 4, to develop existing technologies into new services provided by Instruct-ERIC. Under the title: Towards standard APIs for the exchange of metadata between homelab LIMS, Prof Rik Wierenga has led a project to develop a protocol by which the metadata from crystallisation trials (labelled with a unique crystal-identifier) can be uploaded from a home Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) into ISPyB - a LIMS that provides a managed environment to track and report protein crystallography experiments at a synchrotron. In turn, a crystal identification code can then be returned by ISPyB so that the diffraction data from the synchrotron can be linked to the homelab LIMS. The new data-transfer protocol was developed by integration with IceBear: software, also developed at the FBMM, to track homelab protein crystallisation. The integration of ISPyB and IceBear offers a number of advantages for the acquisition and analysis of crystallisation and diffraction data at the homelab and beamline, and allows important data associated with structure determination to be recorded in a single database.

To download the full presentation, click below: