DEVELOPMENT OF ACOUSTIC AND ELECTROSTATIC LEVITATORS FOR CONTAINERLESS PROTEIN CRYSTALLIZATION

Extensive efforts are being made to fabricate large, high-quality protein crystals by taking advantage of the microgravity environment in space. Containerless processing, that is, growing crystals suspended under microgravity, is a promising technique. We have developed acoustic and electrostatic levitators for containerless processing which can levitate liquid droplets for more than two hundred hours. Using these levitators we did protein crystallization experiments on lysozyme in a 1-g environment to determine whether the levitators influence crystal growth.