Three macromolecular crystallography (MX) beamlines at the HelmholtzZentrum Berlin (HZB) are available for the regional, national and international structural biology user community. The state-of-the-art synchrotron beamlines for MX BL14.1, BL14.2 and BL14.3 are located within the low-section of the BESSY II electron storage ring. All beamlines are fed from a superconducting 7 T wavelength-shifter insertion device. BL14.1 and BL14.2 are energy tunable in the range 5-16 keV, while BL14.3 is a fixed-energy side station operated at 13.8 keV. All three beamlines are equipped with CCD detectors. BL14.1 and BL14.2 are in regular user operation providing about 200 beam days per year and about 600 user shifts to approximately 50 research groups across Europe. BL14.3 has initially been used as a test facility and was brought into regular user mode operation during the year 2010. BL14.1 has recently been upgraded with a microdiffractometer including a mini-goniometer and an automated sample changer. Additional user facilities include office space adjacent to the beamlines, a sample preparation laboratory, a biology laboratory (safety level 1) and highend computing resources. In this article the instrumentation of the beamlines is described, and a summary of the experimental possibilities of the beamlines and the provided ancillary equipment for the user community is given.

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MXCuBE2 is the second-generation evolution of the MXCuBE beamline control software, initially developed and used at ESRF – the European Synchrotron. MXCuBE2 extends, in an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), the functionalities and data collection methods available to users while keeping all previously available features and allowing for the straightforward incorporation of ongoing and future developments. MXCuBE2 introduces an extended abstraction layer that allows easy interfacing of any kind of macromolecular crystallography (MX) hardware component, whether this is a diffractometer, sample changer, detector or optical element. MXCuBE2 also works in strong synergy with the ISPyB Laboratory Information Management System, accessing the list of samples available for a particular experimental session and associating, either from instructions contained in ISPyB or from user input via the MXCuBE2 GUI, different data collection types to them. The development of MXCuBE2 forms the core of a fruitful collaboration which brings together several European synchrotrons and a software development factory and, as such, defines a new paradigm for the development of beamline control platforms for the European MX user community.

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The use of longer X-ray wavelengths in macromolecular crystallography has grown significantly over the past few years. The main reason for this increased use of longer wavelengths has been to utilize the anomalous signal from sulfur, providing a means for the experimental phasing of native proteins. Here, another possible application of longer X-ray wavelengths is presented: MAD at the L III edges of various lanthanide compounds. A first experiment at the L III edge of Pr was conducted on HZB MX beamline BL14.2 and resulted in the successful structure determination of the C-terminal domain of a spliceosomal protein. This experiment demonstrates that L III edges of lanthanides constitute potentially attractive targets for long-wavelength MAD experiments.