Abstract
VMXi is a new high-flux microfocus macromolecular crystallography beamline at Diamond Light Source. The beamline, dedicated to fully automated and fully remote data collection of macromolecular crystals in situ, allows rapid screening of hundreds of crystallization plates from multiple user groups. Its main purpose is to give fast feedback at the complex stages of crystallization and crystal optimization, but it also enables data collection of small and delicate samples that are particularly difficult to harvest using conventional cryo-methods, crystals grown in the lipidic cubic phase, and allows for multi-crystal data collections in drug discovery programs. The beamline is equipped with two monochromators: one with a narrow band-pass and fine energy resolution (optimal for regular oscillation experiments), and one with a wide band-pass and a high photon flux (optimal for fast screening). The beamline has a state-of-the-art detector and custom goniometry that allows fast data collection. This paper describes the beamline design, current status and future plans.
Highlights
As we are looking for answers to ever more complex scientific questions in structural biology, projects are becoming increasingly challenging
We introduce the VMXi beamline at Diamond Light Source (DLS), a new microfocus macromolecular crystallography (MX) beamline dedicated to fully automatic screening and data collection from crystals in situ
The VMXi beamline addresses a number of related current needs in MX: (1) identifying diffraction-quality crystals for biological systems that are difficult and expensive to crystallize, (2) obtaining diffraction datasets for the biological systems of which crystals are routinely resistant to cryogenic harvesting, and (3) characterizing protein–ligand interactions rapidly by collecting large numbers of datasets from similar crystals with different compounds added
Summary
As we are looking for answers to ever more complex scientific questions in structural biology, projects are becoming increasingly challenging. At VMXi it is possible to test whether your ‘micro crystal’ hits are protein and whether they diffract, providing essential and immediate feedback, so that either crystals can be further optimized or, importantly, false positives can be rapidly discarded, saving both time and money for the researcher This is valuable in the case of membrane protein crystals grown in the lipidic cubic phase where the harvesting step is extremely problematic (Caffrey, 2003). Data collection and data processing tools have evolved around these new developments and it is standard practice using in situ data collection to be able to obtain full structural information from partial datasets on multiple samples (Foadi et al, 2013; Zander et al, 2015; Santoni et al, 2017; Stellato et al, 2014) It is a huge step forward for many challenging projects to be able to analyse samples in situ, bypassing the additional sample manipulation associated with cryo-cooling methods. In situ crystallography is possible using a laboratory-based X-ray source (PlateMate, Rigaku) (Hargreaves, 2012), but is offered routinely at a number of synchrotron facilities around the world, including the DLS beamlines I03 and I24 (Aller et al, 2015; Axford et al, 2012; Materlik et al, 2015; Allan et al, 2015), the SLS beamline X06DA (PXIII) (BingelErlenmeyer et al, 2011), the ESRF beamlines BM30 and BM14 (le Maire et al, 2011), the APS beamline GM/CA (Broecker et al, 2016) and the PETRA beamline P14 (DESY, Hamburg, Germany)
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