Metal-Assisted and Microwave-Accelerated Evaporative Crystallization: Application to L-Alanine.

L-Alanine is an important amino acid that plays a key role in the molecular structure of many proteins. Crystallized forms of this molecule are currently in high demand in chemical, pharmaceutics, and food industries. However, the traditional evaporative crystallization method takes up to several hours to complete and does not always consistently yield usable crystals. Using the metal-assisted and microwave-accelerated evaporative crystallization (MA-MAEC) technique, larger and better-organized L-alanine crystals were formed in a fraction of the time using room temperature crystallization. This technique may be applicable to organic molecules other than amino acids and thus will be able to produce the large amount of molecular crystals desired by industries today.