Nucleating and phasing agents for crystallography

Our work on the use of lanthanide complexes led to the design of a novel family: the crystallophores. These new lanthanide complexes showed unprecedented nucleating and phasing properties providing an all-in-one solution to the two major bottlenecks of protein crystallography. They were thus patented in January 2006 (CEA / CNRS / ENS-Lyon / Univ. Lyon I are co-owners).

A start-up company, Polyvalan, was founded to develop this technology and commercialized a first compound, named Tb-Xo4.