Annual Review 2024-2025

throughput, micro- and nano-focus beams, extremely long wavelengths, room temperature in situ collection from crystallisation plates and (time-resolved) serial synchrotron crystallography (SSX). The staff of the MX group are recognised as innovative world leaders in MX, moving the goalposts of what is feasible for ‘conventional’ MX as well as developing techniques and beamlines that transform MX to the next level, enabling new experiments and methodologies. One new future capability will be the exploitation of high energy electrons with the electron diffraction instrument HeXI currently in development following funding from the Wellcome Trust. Additionally, as part of the Diamond-II upgrade, XChem fragment screening will be transformed into a fully automated pipeline at the new K04 beamline, providing the capability to deliver larger campaigns while also investigating more challenging protein targets. Macromolecular crystallography (MX) exploits the high flux X-rays created at Diamond to enable our large international academic and industrial user community to investigate the structure and function of biological macromolecules at atomistic resolution and up to millisecond timescales. This provides deep insight into the details of biological activity key to our understanding of the processes of life. MX is a core activity at Diamond with seven beamlines (I03, I04, I04-1, I23, I24, VMXi and VMXm) dedicated to the technique alongside the XFEL Hub, Membrane Protein Laboratory, Crystallisation Facility and XChem fragment screening facility for the extensive UK structural biology community as well as researchers in Europe and beyond. The beamlines cover a very broad range of capabilities from high Macromolecular Crystallography Group A N N U A L R E V I E W 2 0 2 4 / 2 5 M A C R OMO L E C U L A R C RY S TA L L O G R A P H Y G R O U P 18 Instrument on the I04-1 beamline