Just before the Winter shutdown, XAIRA beamline achieved another key milestone: the first data set being collected from a protein crystal. A great success that highlights the steady advance of the beamline, reached thanks to the efforts of many people!
At XAIRA beamline, the largest efforts for the last two months have been devoted to the installation of the beamline End Station, which includes all the instrumentation required for positioning of the sample and the actual recording of diffraction data. Previously, the beamline optics had also been commissioned, to filter the X-rays in the synchrotron light produced by the insertion device (the XAIRA source) and focus them onto the sample position.
Thanks to all this previous work, on December 1st the focused X-ray beam was used to illuminate a crystal of hen egg-white lysozyme, leading to the first protein diffraction of the beamline. To collect oscillation data, the sample, which is held on a diffractometer, was rotated during data collection. The XAIRA diffractometer is a set of high-precision stages combined with an air/helium-bearing goniometer, has been designed and built in-house, with the purpose of maintaining the sample within the beam path with a high level of precision, even when turning at speeds of 1 turn per second or even higher.
Diffraction data was collected with XAIRA’s state-of-the-art detector, an Eiger2 XE 9M hybrid pixel-array detector, at 100 Hz (that is, 100 frames per second, which means 1 frame every 0.01 seconds). The whole experiment lasted just 36 seconds, during which 3600 images (~8 GB of data) were collected. Data was then processed using the beamline fast data processing pipeline.
Read more on ALBA website
Image: Close up view of the sample environment. The sample pin is shown in the centre, on top of the diffractometer; next to it, the cryostream nozzle is blowing cold nitrogen gas to the sample, to keep it under cryogenic conditions. To the right of the sample, the sample visualisation system. On the left, the detector (behind the slatted cover) and the beam diagnostics.