Sylvie Roke Awarded ERC Proof of Concept Grant
© 2020 EPFL
Sylvie Roke from the EPFL School of Engineering, Institute of Bioengineering, has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant.
Sylvie Roke, director of the Laboratory for fundamental BioPhotonics (LBP), affiliated to the Institute of Bioengineering of which she is the associate director, received the grant for a proposal titled “Fail FAST: Accelerate your crystallization process by Finding and Assessing proteIn nano-crystaLs”. ERC PoC grants provide €150,000 over 18 months for researchers to further investigate the commercial or societal potential of their projects.
The emerging technology behind this proposal will be brought to the market by Oryl Photonics, a spin-off company that is currently being incubated by Orly Tarun, former Ph.D. student in the Roke Lab, recipient of the 2019 Distinction of the doctoral program in Photonics (EDPO), as well as of EPFL Enable and Innogrant and SNSF BRIDGE grants.
High-resolution protein structures obtained by X-ray diffraction require the production of well-ordered proteins crystals of high quality. However, to produce well-ordered protein crystals, several bottlenecks must be addressed to screen and optimize the thousands of conditions that can lead to crystallization. In this project, we will accelerate the process of protein crystallization by detecting early, i.e., assessing nano-crystal formation and providing immediate feedback, instead of waiting for crystals to grow, thereby saving time and money. We will use nonlinear light scattering that is highly sensitive to crystal formation. In combination with machine learning analysis, we will develop optimization routines to predict the conditions that likely lead to crystallization in a very short time scale, hours, instead of weeks.