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Industrial Liaison Group:
Tel: +44 (0) 1235 778797
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I04 is a high throughput tuneable beamline for macromolecular crystallography (MX). Since opening to users in 2007, it has been a highly productive structural biology facility for the UK and international academic and industrial communities as part of the suite of five operational MX beamlines here at Diamond Light Source.
Its user programme has resulted in more than 550 journal papers and 750 structure depositions in the protein data bank (www.rcsb.org). Over and above this, untold numbers of structures have resulted from work carried out by I04s industrial user programme. Whilst running this highly productive user programme the beamline team, our MX beamline colleagues and Diamond support groups have delivered continuous upgrades to the beamline.
The outcome of some of the recent upgrades to the beamline has been the optimisation of signal to noise in data collections, which is particularly useful for phasing structures from some of the most challenging projects. To this end we have implemented a mini-kappa goniometer which enables optimised crystal orientations for data collections for obtaining the best anomalous signal or to avoid spot overlap from very large unit cells.
A new focussing system using compound refractive lenses, known as the F-Switch, has been implemented and is used in the place of mirrors. This enables rapid selection of beam sizes between 5 – 100 µm over an energy range of 6 – 14 keV, allowing the user to match this to the crystal size and therefore optimise signal to noise ratio ultimately resulting in high quality data collection on a fast, large pixel array detector. I04 is therefore the second MX beamline (alongside I24) at Diamond that delivers microfocus beams for investigation of the smallest crystals or for direct investigation of diffraction properties of crystals using rapid grid scan data collections.
In addition to these hardware improvements, the data collection scripts used by GDA have been structured to optimise the very rapid collection of inverse beam and interleaved energy data sets. This is particularly beneficial in collecting truly optimised data sets for phasing structures from weak anomalous scatterers and radiation sensitive samples. The most recent development on I04 has been the installation of the in-house developed BART robot (Fig. 2). The version installed on I04 has been upgraded to accommodate 37 Unipucks (592 sample pins) and together with upgrades to control hardware for the mini-kappa goniometer, sample exchange times are now of the order of 17 seconds compared with 42 seconds before the upgrade.
All of these improvements have been designed to keep I04 at the forefront of MX capabilities, ensuring the highest data quality and tools to enable the solution of some of the most difficult structures. These have been incorporated into the beamline in a way such that they increase and improve the capabilities of a leading high throughput MX beamline. www.diamond.ac.uk/Beamlines/Mx/I04.html
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