Mobile Scanner for Protein Crystallization Plates

Abstract

Protein crystallization well plate is a rectangular platform that contains wells usually organized as a grid structure. The crystallization conditions are studied through a screening process by setting up the trial conditions in the well plate. In the past, the expert evaluates the trial wells for the growth of crystals by manually viewing the plate under a microscope or using a high-throughput plate imaging and analysis system. While the first method is tedious and cumbersome, the second method requires financial investment. Recently, a few approaches were developed by collecting images using smartphones thus enabling low-cost automatic scoring (classification) of well images. Nevertheless, these recent methods do not detect which well on the plate is captured. If the user has a smartphone, the user may capture or scan any well by just moving the smartphone to the corresponding well. In this paper, we propose a mobile scanner that identifies the well by using a coded template under the well plate. The mobile scanner provides two modes: image and video. Image mode is used for single well analysis whereas video mode is used to scan the complete plate. In the video mode, the mobile scanner app generates a tilemap of the plate.