pipeline from proteins to crystals and to the molecular structure is described in fig7 fig7 illustrates a structural genomics pipeline 700 from protein 701 to crystal 702 to atomic structure 703 referring now to fig1 7 the present invention provides an automated method and system for detecting the presence of macromolecular crystals from light microscopy images such as those obtained from crystallography experiments generally the automated method utilizes the phase information of the pixels in each image in performing crystal detection this provides much lower sensitivity to noise and other artifacts compared to amplitude or gradient based methods and leads to an edge map with many more features and in particular the edge map provided by the phase congruency method is used to identify specific geometric features in an image attributable to and most likely indicative of a crystalline structure such as for example parallel edges of similar length facing each other in relatively close proximity evaluation of detected geometries in this manner makes possible a low rate of false positive detections and an effective resolution to the visual inspection bottleneck discussed in the background caused by manual inspections it is notable that the term u201c automated u201d suggests the absence of human intervention although oversight of detection performance may still be present implementation of the present invention is suitably achieved using for example software computer code rom.