Revisiting the Monash Macromolecular Crystallisation Facility
The Monash Macromolecular Crystallisation Facility (MMCF)*https://www.monash.edu/research/infrastructure/platforms-pages/crystallisation, a Monash Technology Research Platform (MTRP), was established in 2009 by the Department of Biochemistry at Monash University.
The facility provides researchers access to the 3D structure of biological macromolecules, necessary for the rational design of therapeutics. It does this by hosting an extensive array of fully-automated and high-throughput crystallisation equipment. Every year the facility processes about 1300 crystallisation plates for Monash users, each plate allowing 96 experiments for one or two samples at a time. In the second half of 2021 the facility also welcomed users from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research who ran experiments at the facility on an interim basis until the first quarter of 2022. Figure 1 below shows the MMCF facility with its instrumentations.
Figure 1. The MMCF Facility
Back in 2016*https://rcblog.erc.monash.edu.au/blog/2016/09/mmcf-upgrade-on-rcmon/, The MMCF partnered with Formulatrix, Monash eSolutions and the Monash eResearch Centre to upgrade the facility’s IT infrastructure for a new generation of crystallisation technology. A high-level diagram of the MMCF connection flow and architecture is shown in Figure 2. The R@CMon team provisioned a custom Microsoft Windows-based infrastructure on the Monash node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud for hosting the platform’s crystallisation and imaging system. An enterprise database has been configured and maintained by R@CMonMonash eSolutions to support this new system. The facility’s networking infrastructure has been completely revamped by Monash eSolutions too to accommodate the new interconnected MMCF services. The R@CMon team worked with the vendor, Formulatrix, to deploy the instrument’s software stack. Through Research Data Storage (RDS), a dedicated research data storage has been provisioned for the facility’s experiments and imaging data, and has since been expanded to 50 TB to cope with the uptake in experiments. The new MMCF platform utilised the infrastructure as a service capability of R@CMon, providing on-demand compute and storage resources.
Figure 2. MMCF Connection Flow/Architecture.
The feedback on the facility has been consistently positive through the annual MTRP user feedback surveys. The facility has supported research on SARS-CoV-2https://www.monash.edu/discovery-institute/news-and-events/news/2020-articles/melbourne-researchers-map-the-structure-of-a-covid-19-protein, the virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic, and facilitated the gaining of major funding and rewards by various researchers such as an NHMRC Synergy Grant in 2019https://www.grants.gov.au/Ga/Show/7592a1cb-d64b-d970-8077-e81d75a8d51c. The Director of the facility, Prof Jamie Rossjohn*https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/jamie-rossjohn-faa-fahms-flsw-fmedsci, whose laboratory is a major user of the facility, is ranked in the top one percent by citations in the field of immunology every year from 2018 to 2021. The R@CMon team continues to support the platform to provide high-throughput crystallisation services to researchers. The team at Monash is also working with Formulatrix to test the next generation capabilities and improvements that further improves user experience and processing.