The High Throughput Crystallization Laboratory is a major facility for automated, nanovolume, crystallization screening located at the EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) Grenoble Outstation. 

The standard plates routinely used at the HTX platform are the CrystalDirect^TM 96-well plates, which are ideally suited for crystallization experiments, but also for in situ, serial data collection and LCP experiments. When used in combination with the CrystalDirect^TM Harvester (developed by the Marquez & Cipriani teams), this gives access to fully automated crystal soaking, cryo-cooling and harvesting (Zander et al., 2016). By removing the bottlenecks represented by manual crystal processing, the CrystalDirect^TM Technology is accelerating progress for challenging projects that require the analysis of many samples. Moreover, it precludes the need to add cryo-protectants before cryo-cooling (Bezerra et al., 2017, Fernandez et al., 2017, Zander et al., 2016). 

The HTX lab has also developed the web-based Crystallization Information Management System (CRIMS), which is currently used by multiple laboratories.  The combination of the CrystalDirect^TM Technology with the ESRF MASSIF-1 as well as the CRIMS and ISPyB systems has enabled the development of fully automated, protein-to-structure pipelines, integrating crystallization, crystal mounting and processing as well as X-ray data collection and analysis in a continuous, remote-controlled workflow.

These pipelines are being applied to support challenging projects in structural biology as well as to provide access to large-scale fragment screening. Scientists working at either academic labs or industry can access the HTX platform services, offered via the EU-funded iNEXT program (in collaboration with ESRF) and EMBLEM, respectively. Furthermore, all users have remote web-based access to experimental set-up and results in real-time (Marquez & Cipriani, 2014).