New Proposal & Group Start-Up Guide

Beamtime is awarded on scientific merit, so when applying for beamtime in UAS the Co-Investigators listed will be crucial to show the breadth of science in your group. Once a group has beamtime awarded, then additional roles in UAS are needed, which among other things will give access to ISPyB where shipment and experimental data is stored:

• Associate - simply associates a User to the proposal, which enables them to find the proposal in UAS, but with no additional rights
• ERA Editor - the same as for the Associate role, but will also all enable the User to submit ERA items (Samples, Equipment & Experimental Methods)
• Alternate Contacts (AC) - when doing Responsive Scheduling, the PI and ACs are notified of experimental sessions.To facilitate this, we recommend at least one AC in each institution or geographical location within your BAG or group 

More information on each of these is available on the Investigators tab in your proposal, in UAS.

Any samples sent to Diamond must be validated by our Safety team, prior to you shipping them to us. This enables us to implement any additional safety measures needed for your samples when they arrive on site. 

With more than 30 beamlines as well as additional facilities at Diamond, our Safety team can't conduct all of their checks at short notice, so please submit samples at least 2 weeks in advance. They often conduct checks much quicker than this.

See the Adding Samples in UAS page for full instructions.

Please email [email protected] to request IDs for your dewars. These are in the format e.g. DLS-MX-1234. You can have as many dewar IDs as you need, to enable you to rotate your dewars. We will add these to your proposal, and issue you with a temporary label to apply - then when your dewar arrives on site, we will apply a more permanent one.

We can easily have over 100 dewars on site at one time, so it is important that we can track them all robustly.

Your pucks need to be added to the databases by someone in the Diamond team - as it is used to link many systems together for safety, logistics, data collection and data access. Please email a list to [email protected].

Note this needs to be accurate as computers will read e.g. "ABC123", "ABC-123" and "ABC_123" differently.

If your pucks do not have a barcode etched on them, then we will do this while the samples are in the robot dewar on the beamline. You can send additional pucks in, at room temperature, in the dewar case, if you would like more to be etched initially.

Once your samples have been Validated in UAS, by our Safety team, they will appear in the "Proteins" tab in ISPyB. Here you can add additional information about your protein which will improve the Autoprocessing pipelines, and you can add variations of the protein. Adding the protein sequence and/or any PDBs of similar samples will be very beneficial.

Full instructions are available on the Registering a Protein page.

An explanation of the downstream processing from this can be found on the Downstream Processing Results page, and the AlphaFold: Downstream Processing page.

Lab Contacts are the people who manages the shipment creation process - this may be a facility manager, or an individual scientist.

For Responsive Scheduling, this is the person who we will ask about potential timings for the visit, so should be someone who is aware of the availabilities of the whole team.

Here are full instructions to Add a Lab Contact.

When you create a shipment, you generate the information about everything that you are sending to us - such as who is sending us which dewar(s) containing which puck(s), containing which protein(s). 

Full instructions on how to Create a Shipment.

Full instructions on how to Register Samples in pucks within that shipment.

Please only use Unipucks and standard SPINE Stanard pins.