Case study

Working with micrograms instead of milligrams.

A structure solved from a sub-microgram, impure sample – where there simply wasn't enough material for any conventional method.

The challenge

Less than 1 mg, and not an option for anything else.

A leading pharmaceutical company approached us with an HPLC fraction containing less than 1 mg of an unknown natural product – a honey-like, gel-type substance, clearly not fully pure and difficult to analyse by any other method. The task: obtain structural information from it. Conventional approaches were simply not an option.

A sub-microgram sample being mounted on the ED-1 holder tip

What ELDICO did

Precision at the sub-microgram scale.

Drawing on our expertise in micro-filtration and micro-crystallisation, we worked the material down to a single measurable crystallite – and solved it.

< 100 µg crystallised

Crystallised less than 100 µg of sample directly onto a 3 mm TEM grid, ready for measurement.

New compound solved

Determined the structure of a new macro-cyclic natural compound by electron diffraction.

Insight from an impure sample

Delivered structural certainty from a sub-microgram, non-pure fraction – no bulk crystallisation required.

Download the case study if

This sounds like your sample.

  • You don't have enough material available.
  • You haven't been able to isolate your compound of interest.
  • You haven't been able to crystallise your target molecule.
  • You haven't been able to structurally characterise your (new) compound.
Reciprocal-lattice visualisation from electron-diffraction data

Download the full case study.

See how we crystallised less than 100 µg and solved a new macro-cyclic natural product by electron diffraction.

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