Abstract
Automated, pulsed liquid-phase sample delivery has the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of both sample and photon use at pulsed X-ray facilities. In this work, an automated drop on demand (DOD) system that accelerates sample exchange for serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) is demonstrated. Four different protein crystal slurries were tested, and this technique is further improved here with an automatic sample-cycling system whose effectiveness was verified by the indexing results. Here, high-throughput SFX screening is shown to be possible at free-electron laser facilities with very low risk of cross contamination and minimal downtime. The development of this technique will significantly reduce sample consumption and enable structure determination of proteins that are difficult to crystallize in large quantities. This work also lays the foundation for automating sample delivery.
Highlights
Liquid sample delivery at free-electron laser (FEL) facilities has, to date, been mostly through continuous flow devices and manually exchanged samples and injectors
Droplet dispensing technology has been employed for some FEL applications such as serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) and hard X-ray spectroscopy in which drop on demand (DOD) dispensers were used (Echelmeier et al, 2020; Fuller et al, 2017; Mafuneet al., 2016; Miller et al, 2019; Roessler et al, 2016)
We demonstrate a pulsed sample delivery source that automates many of the tasks currently performed manually
Summary
Liquid sample delivery at free-electron laser (FEL) facilities has, to date, been mostly through continuous flow devices and manually exchanged samples and injectors. Droplet dispensing technology has been employed for some FEL applications such as serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) and hard X-ray spectroscopy in which drop on demand (DOD) dispensers were used (Echelmeier et al, 2020; Fuller et al, 2017; Mafuneet al., 2016; Miller et al, 2019; Roessler et al, 2016). Another technology in which drops are generated through controlled breakup of liquid jets has been used for liquid-phase and high-energy density studies (Kim et al, 2018; Sellberg et al, 2014).
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