Welcome to VMXm

VMXm is a micro/nanofocus Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) beamline aimed at atomic structure determination in cases where the production of significant quantities of protein material and/or large enough crystals is problematic. Indeed this is the case for many challenging protein complexes, membrane proteins and medically important macromolecules that yield only very small crystals.

The X-ray beam size on VMXm can be less than 0.5 microns and with the use of novel X-ray optics and electron beam imaging methods we will be able to precisely align the tiniest protein crystals into this X-ray beam, in vacuo, and measure X-ray diffraction data from them.

The ability to tune the X-ray energy allows us to exploit photoelectron escape within microcrystals at higher energies. With the CdTe Eiger detector the quantum efficiency is also improved at higher energies . These two factors lead to prolonged lifetime of crystals in the beam and gives the potential to collect data off fewer crystals.

In many ways VMXm will be a hybrid X-ray/cryoEM instrument making use of methods for sample preparation from cryo-electron-microscopy, imaging from scanning electron microscopy and diffraction data collection methods from X-ray crystallography.