We have very successfully adapted the multiwire counter area detector to protein crystallographic data collection in our laboratory at the University of California, San Diego (funded as an NIH Research Resource). We have demonstrated many times that these detectors can increase the speed and efficiency at X-ray data collection from protein crystals by a factor of 100 or more compared to traditional film or single-crystal diffraction methods. The resulting data are also consistently more accurate than data collected by traditional methods. Judging from the large number of requests for time on our laboratory detector system (more than double what we can service each year), there is a clear and intense demand for a commercial versiion of this well-proven detector technology. And we expect this demand to grow rapidly in the coming years, since protein crystallographic work has become very important not only for basic research in molecular biology but also in many biomedical areas such as rational drug design and protein engineering. The proposed work will be centered on making our present successful detector design more commercially practical by simplifying and ruggedizing it. It will thus be easier to build in production quantities and simpler to operate, so it can be used by people who do not need to understand its technical details.
