Speaker
Description
EMBL-Hamburg operates two beamlines for macromolecular crystallography, P13 and P14, at PETRA III (DESY, Hamburg).
P13 delivers high photon fluxes at energies down to 4 keV. Combining X-rays in the 4-6 keV energy range with beam sizes down to 15 µm diameter while maintaining high photon flux and using standard mounting systems (SPINE pins) and robotics allows to solve the crystallographic phase problem via S-SAD phasing; recently the feasibility of MAD-phasing at the Ca K-edge (4.05 keV, 3.1 Å) has been demonstrated
P14 can be run in two modes, one providing a collimated homogeneous beam that can be shaped to any size between 10 and 200 µm, the second mode producing micro-focus conditions with a beam size on the 5 µm scale. Under micro-focus conditions, serial data collections - both under cryogenic and in situ conditions - employing 'serial helical scans'-strategies can be executed conveniently from the MXCuBE user interface.
While several pump-probe and time-resolved experiments have been successfully performed on P14, we are presently constructing a second endstation on P14 to provide flexible beam and sample conditions for pump-probe experiments (in collaboration with the University of Hamburg).
The beamlines are embedded in the Integrated Facility for Structural Biology that offers access to up-stream service such as characterization of samples prior to crystallization, high throughput crystallization, and automatic crystal harvesting with a CrystalDirectTM Harvester.
