Poster Presentation The 42nd Lorne Conference on Protein Structure and Function 2017

MX2: An high-flux undulator microfocus beamline serving both chemical and macromolecular crystallography communities at the Australian Synchrotron (#171)

David Aragao 1 , Nathan P Cowieson 2 , Alan Riboldi-Tunnicliffe 1 , Christine Gee 3 , Daniel Eriksson 1 , Jason Price 1 , Mark Clift 1 , Nathan Mudie 1 , Rachel Williamson 1 , Santosh Panjikar 1 , Stephen Harrop 1 , Tom Caradoc-Davies 1
  1. Australian Synchrotron, Clayton, VIC, Australia
  2. Diamond Light Source Ltd., Didcot, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
  3. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California,, Berkeley, California, United States

MX2 is an in-vacuum undulator based crystallography beamline at the 3 GeV Australian Synchrotron and complements the MX1 bending magnet based beamline [1]. MX2 delivers hard x-rays in the energy range from 4.8 - 21 KeV to a focal spot at the sample position of 15 microns FWHM. At 13 KeV the flux at the sample is typically 2.0 x 10^12 ph/sec. The beamline endstation allows robotic handling of cryogenic samples via an SSRL SAM robot but also room temperature  motorised tray screening capabilities developed in-house.  This beamline is ideal for weakly-diffracting, hard-to-crystallise proteins, viruses, protein assemblies and nucleic acids as well as smaller molecules such as inorganic catalysts and organic drug molecules. The beamline is now mature and has enjoyed a full user program for the last 8 years. This work describes the beamline status, plans for its future and some recent scientific highlights.

 

  1. MX1: a bending-magnet crystallography beamline serving both chemical and macromolecular crystallography communities at the Australian Synchrotron. J Synchrotron Radiat (2015). 22:187-90. doi: 10.1107/S1600577514021717.