The fixed wavelength monochromatic beamline is situated next to the Phase I I04 MX beamline. The photon beam is produced by two undulators placed in a canted formation, allowing I04 and I04-1 photon beams to be separated by 1 mrad. The beamline provides rapid and extensive access to synchrotron radiation for a growing user community composed of both academic and industrial research groups.

In the past decade, technologies such as robotics, improved synchrotron facilities, powerful computing systems and advancement in phasing algorithms have enabled protein structures to be solved more rapidly. In academic research, this ‘high-throughput’ crystallography led to the birth of structure genomic consortiums all around the world with structural biologists now foreseeing the possibility of knowing the three-dimensional structures of proteins of an entire genome. In the case of ligand binding studies, when the structure of the protein of interest is already available, subsequent structures in the presence of ligand molecules can be rapidly obtained using molecular replacement (MR). The structural information describes the protein-ligand interactions to atomic level and is important in understanding complex biological systems, their function and regulation mechanism. In the pharmaceutical industry, this information often allows a more rational approach to drug design and leads to an increased number of structure/fragment-based drug discovery programs.

I04-1 is dedicated to high-throughput data collection for rapid structure solution using MR method. As more structures are available in databases, MR is the most used method for the structure solution of proteins. The wavelength of the I04-1 beamline is fixed at 0.9163 Å (energy of 13530 eV). The beamline will also be fully automated with a sample changer robot, automated crystal alignment, data collection and processing.

Optionally, single anomalous diffraction (SAD) experiments is possible since anomalous signal of several heavy atoms can still be measured at this wavelength. Finally, an X-ray fluorescence detector will be available to establish the metal ions footprint of the sample.