Lance Stewart, Ph.D. (President and CEO) will be in the HUB, Room 108, on Friday, Feb. 25, 2000, from 9am to 2pm.
Emerald BioStructures, Inc. is a leading provider of research products and services for protein crystal growth and structure determination by X-ray crystallography, which is a method whereby the 3-dimensional structure of a protein of interest can be determined to near atomic resolution. Protein structural information is extremely valuable to the pharmaceutical industry, since knowing the 3-D structure of a target protein enables organic chemists to design new drugs that target the protein of interest with exquisite specificity.
Emerald has developed Crystal Monitor, the only commercially available database software package for the capture and analysis of crystallization trial information. The software incorporates proprietary "user definable" speech recognition and audio feed back tools that allow crystallographers to capture crystallization trial data by speaking into the computer. We have a growing proprietary crystallization database that is actively being mined by machine learning tools that are beginning to unlock the secrets of protein crystal growth. With data mining, we expect to significantly reduce the time and effort required to obtain X-ray diffraction quality protein crystals. Moreover, our Crystal Monitor software is rapidly being hooked up to various robotic devices that create solutions, set up crystallizations, observer results, and analyze data.
We intend to become the recognized leader in High-Throughput Crystallization, and already market crystallization screening kits (Wizard and Cryo) and patented crystallization plasticware devices (Clover Plates) which researchers use in their attempts to identify crystallization conditions for their proteins. We will soon be launching E-SCREENS where researchers can design crystallization screening sets on our web site and submit them for manufacture by our company for overnight delivery in our Clover Plates.