Remote access to crystallography beamlines at SSRL: novel tools for training, education and collaboration

Abstract

For the past five years, the Structural Molecular Biology group at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) has provided general users of the facility with fully remote access to the macromolecular crystallography beamlines. This was made possible by implementing fully automated beamlines with a flexible control system and an intuitive user interface, and by the development of the robust and efficient Stanford automated mounting robotic sample-changing system. The ability to control a synchrotron beamline remotely from the comfort of the home laboratory has set a new paradigm for the collection of high-quality X-ray diffraction data and has fostered new collaborative research, whereby a number of remote users from different institutions can be connected at the same time to the SSRL beamlines. The use of remote access has revolutionized the way in which scientists interact with synchrotron beamlines and collect diffraction data, and has also triggered a shift in the way crystallography students are introduced to synchrotron data collection and trained in the best methods for collecting high-quality data. SSRL provides expert crystallographic and engineering staff, state-of-the-art crystallography beamlines, and a number of accessible tools to facilitate data collection and in-house remote training, and encourages the use of these facilities for education, training, outreach and collaborative research.

Implementation and performance of SIBYLS: a dual endstation small-angle X-ray scattering and macromolecular crystallography beamline at the Advanced Light Source

“…MX users come from a wide geographical area, and travel is time consuming, inconvenient and expensive. Remote data collection offers convenience, efficient use of beamtime, flexibility in scheduling and greater access for a broader set of researchers, including students and postdocs (Smith et al, 2010;Soltis et al, 2008). Our solution has been to couple robotic mounting hardware (DOMO, x4.3) with remotely accessible software control of the beamline (Blu-Ice GUI connected via an NX Client).…”

“…The trend in macromolecular crystallography, and more generally in bioscience research, is towards automated and high-throughput methods. There have been numerous efforts from both SAXS (Round et al, 2008;David & Perez, 2009;Blanchet et al, 2012) and MX (Karain et al, 2002;Snell et al, 2004;Cipriani et al, 2006;Cork et al, 2006;Soltis et al, 2008;Jacquamet et al, 2009;Smith et al, 2010;Murakami et al, 2012) beamlines to implement highthroughput and automated data collection methods. The SIBYLS beamline is heavily oversubscribed because of the rising use of biological SAXS.…”

Experimenter's portal

“…Almost a decade ago, the first remote access synchrotron experiments were begun by users of an x-ray diffraction beamline for protein crystallographic (PX) studies at Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory using control software called BluIce that was connected to remote users through NoMachine NX software installed on the users' server [10,11]. This secure software permitted users to run other types of sophisticated beamline control software such as MxCuBE [12] that could also control other types of beamline experiments, such as x-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) or X-ray Fluorescence (XRF).…”

JBluIce–EPICScontrol system for macromolecular crystallography

“…The JBluIce Screening tab was developed de novo because SSRL BluIce did not have this capability at the time that our software was forked. Later versions of SSRL BluIce v.5 offer automatic screening (Soltis et al, 2008;Smith et al, 2010). In the typical operation of the Screening tab, samples arrive in ALS-style, Uni-style or Rigaku-style pucks along with a respective description in an Excel spreadsheet.…”