Abstract
The Frontier Microfocus Macromolecular Crystallography (FMX) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II with its 1 µm beam size and photon flux of 3 × 1012 photons s-1 at a photon energy of 12.66 keV has reached unprecedented dose rates for a structural biology beamline. The high dose rate presents a great advantage for serial microcrystallography in cutting measurement time from hours to minutes. To provide the instrumentation basis for such measurements at the full flux of the FMX beamline, a high-speed, high-precision goniometer based on a unique XYZ piezo positioner has been designed and constructed. The piezo-based goniometer is able to achieve sub-100 nm raster-scanning precision at over 10 grid-linepairs s-1 frequency for fly scans of a 200 µm-wide raster. The performance of the scanner in both laboratory and serial crystallography measurements up to the maximum frame rate of 750 Hz of the Eiger 16M's 4M region-of-interest mode has been verified in this work. This unprecedented experimental speed significantly reduces serial-crystallography data collection time at synchrotrons, allowing utilization of the full brightness of the emerging synchrotron radiation facilities.
Highlights
In macromolecular crystallography (MX), serial crystallography has been the method of choice to overcome limitations in sample dose life under X-ray irradiation
The system we developed has the potential for application well beyond the protein crystallography community; X-ray imaging and microscopy will benefit from this development
We have developed the FastForward Goniometer, a highspeed, high-precision, piezo-based goniometer system to perform serial microcrystallography using the full flux of the fully focused FMX beamline
Summary
In macromolecular crystallography (MX), serial crystallography has been the method of choice to overcome limitations in sample dose life under X-ray irradiation. Before the advent of cryocrystallography (Hope, 1988; Henderson, 1990), the merging of partial datasets from multiple crystals was used to deal with the limited dose life (Kendrew et al, 1960) and continues to be used in room-temperature crystallography for hard-to-freeze crystals, such as virus crystals (Fry et al, 1999; Axford et al, 2012; Rossmann, 2015). With the latest generation of high-brilliance storage-ring sources, beamlines are being constructed that enable XFEL-like serial crystallography to be performed at storage-ring facilities (Yamamoto et al, 2017). The appeal of these instruments is that they enable crystallographic data collection from microcrystals that would previously have been too small to yield useable diffraction data.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
