(705c) Frontiers of Industrial Crystallization Science and Technology

Industrial crystallization is an environmentally friendly unit operation mainly used to separate or purify a variety of materials. Compared with crystallography, industrial crystallization is a large-scale process that focuses on improving physical properties of powders and on the effects of operating conditions and process control on nucleation and crystal growth. Over the past decades, great progress has been made in many aspects of industrial crystallization, including polymorphism, morphology, online control technology, computer simulations of crystallization and crystallizer design. The modern industrial crystallization technology is the key common technologies for preparation of high-end products in pharmaceutical industry, materials industry, marine chemicals, energy chemical, fine chemical industry, food industry and etc.
Crystallization has been quite routinely practiced for low molecular weight compounds in the laboratory and in industrial manufacturing. Using crystallization, especially in industrial manufacturing processes, has many advantages such as reducing costs, greater stability of the crystals and increased functional characteristics such as product formulation, transport and storage.Furthermore, the crystallization of macromolecular compounds such as proteins and nano materials such as Quantum dots are generally practiced at the laboratory-scale and used as a research tool. However, there is very few rule in protein and Quantum dots crystallization as compared to low molecular weight compounds, especially for industrial scale protein crystallization.
Being targets for over 50% of all modern medicinal drugs, membrane proteins have essential physiological functions. Unfortunately, compared to soluble proteins, very less has been known about membrane proteins. By the end of 2015, there are about 110,000 structures available in protein data bank, but only 1% is membrane proteins.
The major aim of our work in membrane protein crystallization was to structurally and functionally characterize MOP proteins. Five type of MOP proteins, 1 from PST family, and 4 from MATE family were from different organisms and successfully overproduced in E. coli. Then we focus on the MATE transporter from Pseudomonas stutzeri, on which extensive functional characterization and crystallization trials have been performed.

The green engineering technology of crystallization involving coupling crystallization processes; process intensification; simulation and optimization of process process analytical technologyas well as feedback control of processes (Technology + Equipment + CAD + +CAC+CAM etc). Considering all of these criteria, we selected the following objects for our international cooperation research project:
1. Biological macromolecular medicine drug delivery systemsï¼›
Mechanisms of crystallization for biological macromolecular medicine;
2. Crystal engineering of membrane protein;
3. Crystallization process intensification (PI) and micro-crystallizer.
Over the past decades, the significant advance have been made in our understanding of some mechanism of industrial crystallization processes even though the crystallization still situated in a semi-science and semi-art stage. We expect to enhance the international information exchange and the academic cooperation about crystallization process development for speeding up the advance in chemical industry over the world.