The present report is dedicated to a systematic comparison of crystal structures produced by the nanobiofilm template method and by the classical hanging-drop vapour-diffusion method. Crystals grown by the innovative nanostructured template method appear indeed radiation-resistant even in the presence of a third-generation highly focused beam at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The implications of this finding for protein crystallography are discussed here in terms of water redistribution and of the detailed atomic resolution comparative studies of the two crystal structures with or without nanobiofilm template, as emerging also from circular-dichroism and thermal denaturation studies.
We present the DNA analyzer (DNASER), a novel bioinstrumentation for real-time acquisition and elaboration of images from fluorescent DNA microarrays. A white light beam illuminates the target sample allowing the images grabbing on a high sensibility and wide-band charge-coupled device camera (ORCA II-Hamamatsu). This high-performance device permits to acquire images faster and of higher quality than the traditional systems. The DNA microarrays images are processed to recognize the DNA chip spots, to analyze their superficial distribution on the glass slide and to evaluate their geometric and intensity properties. Differently form conventional techniques, the spots analysis is fully automated and the DNASER does not require any additional information about the DNA microarray geometry. The DNASER hardware and software architecture is illustrated. Preliminary results are shown from experiments performed on real DNA samples.
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