Diamond Annual Review 2023/24

15 D I A M O N D L I G H T S O U R C E A N N U A L R E V I E W 2 0 2 3 / 2 4 APS have run several user calls for MX access to Diamond and Diamond have been providing remote access and UDC toMX beamlines I03, I04, I04-1 and I24. This will continue through until September 2024. The MX group continued to offer a wide range of outreach and training opportunities over the last year. These included our regular two day BAG trainings to share updates and best practices at the beamlines, laboratories and our software, sample preparation for serial synchrotron crystallography and XChem training visits. We celebrated the 10 th year of running the joint CCP4-Diamond crystallography workshop in December with over 20 early career researchers coming to Diamond for nine days to work closely with experts in the field to analyse their own data and collect data at Diamond’s MX beamlines. This year we have initiated outreach workshops to showcase the science capabilities of the beamlines and facilities with our first event held at the Francis Crick Institute and further workshops around the UK are in the pipeline. In 2023, MX group users published nearly 300 journal papers and deposited nearly 1,200 structures in the publicly accessible protein data bank and the MX group underwent a successful international review for Diamond’s Science Advisory Committee. The scientific output for our users and the capabilities available to them is thanks to the expertise, efforts and dedication of the staff of the MX group and the many support groups that help deliver a user programme optimised around user needs alongside continual development to bring improved and new capabilities regularly to the user community. serial crystallographic data. This offers the ability to both assess microcrystals that appear in vapour diffusion plates and to assess the quality of batch crystallisation experiments by transferring small aliquots to a crystallisation plate for grid scanning. This work is described in Thompson et al. (2024) Acta Cryst. D. 80, 279-288 5 . The micro/nanofocus beamline VMXm has had a successful year taking users to assist with our optimisation of the beamline. Some novel structures including that from a 70-year-old crystal sample (Keown et al 6 ) have resulted, and interest from both academic groups and industry is growing for both macromolecular and small molecule research. The high-energy electron Xtallography Instrument (HeXI) funded by Wellcome will further enhance the MX group’s capabilities to perform micro to nano crystal diffraction analyses of protein and small molecule crystals. The HeXI team has recently completed the Technical Design Review for the phase two instrument and this has enabled the project to successfully tender for the MeV electron source. The full instrument layout will also enable the imminent issuing of the tender for the experimental hutch. The commencement of the procurement of these two high-value, long lead-time items are highly significant project milestones towards the anticipated successful delivery of the instrument in 2026. Since April 2023, the Advanced Photon Source, USA has been undergoing a machine upgrade to its fourth generation source APS-U and Diamond MX collaboratively have been supporting the APS MX academic user community. 5 https://journals.iucr.org/d/issues/2024/04/00/wa5148/index.html 6 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39819-1 The longwavelength beamline I23 has continued to establish itself as theworldwide unique instrument for MX in awavelength range not available elsewhere. With its in vacuum sample environment and a detector covering a large angular range it serves for awide range of experiments.