AMX - the highly automated macromolecular crystallography (17-ID-1) beamline at the NSLS-II

Dieter K Schneider; Alexei S Soares; Edwin O Lazo; Dale F Kreitler; Kun Qian; Martin R Fuchs; Dileep K Bhogadi; Steve Antonelli; Stuart S Myers; Bruno S Martins; John M Skinner; Jun Aishima; Herbert J Bernstein; Thomas Langdon; John Lara; Robert Petkus; Matt Cowan; Leonid Flaks; Thomas Smith; Grace Shea-McCarthy; Mourad Idir; Lei Huang; Oleg Chubar; Robert M Sweet; Lonny E Berman; Sean McSweeney; Jean Jakoncic

doi:10.1107/S1600577522009377

AMX - the highly automated macromolecular crystallography (17-ID-1) beamline at the NSLS-II

J Synchrotron Radiat. 2022 Nov 1;29(Pt 6):1480-1494. doi: 10.1107/S1600577522009377. Epub 2022 Oct 21.

Authors

Dieter K Schneider¹, Alexei S Soares², Edwin O Lazo², Dale F Kreitler², Kun Qian², Martin R Fuchs², Dileep K Bhogadi³, Steve Antonelli², Stuart S Myers², Bruno S Martins⁴, John M Skinner², Jun Aishima², Herbert J Bernstein², Thomas Langdon², John Lara², Robert Petkus⁵, Matt Cowan⁶, Leonid Flaks⁵, Thomas Smith⁷, Grace Shea-McCarthy², Mourad Idir², Lei Huang², Oleg Chubar², Robert M Sweet², Lonny E Berman², Sean McSweeney², Jean Jakoncic²

Affiliations

¹ New York Structural Biology Center, New York, New York, USA.
² NSLS-II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, USA.
³ LCLS, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, California, USA.
⁴ Azure Data, Microsoft (United States), Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
⁵ Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, USA.
⁶ CSI, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, USA.
⁷ Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, USA.

Abstract

The highly automated macromolecular crystallography beamline AMX/17-ID-1 is an undulator-based high-intensity (>5 × 10¹² photons s^-1), micro-focus (7 µm × 5 µm), low-divergence (1 mrad × 0.35 mrad) energy-tunable (5-18 keV) beamline at the NSLS-II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, USA. It is one of the three life science beamlines constructed by the NIH under the ABBIX project and it shares sector 17-ID with the FMX beamline, the frontier micro-focus macromolecular crystallography beamline. AMX saw first light in March 2016 and started general user operation in February 2017. At AMX, emphasis has been placed on high throughput, high capacity, and automation to enable data collection from the most challenging projects using an intense micro-focus beam. Here, the current state and capabilities of the beamline are reported, and the different macromolecular crystallography experiments that are routinely performed at AMX/17-ID-1 as well as some plans for the near future are presented.

Keywords: automation; beamline; high throughput; macromolecular crystallography; micro-beam; real-time feedback; synchrotron source.

open access.

MeSH terms

Crystallography, X-Ray
Macromolecular Substances / chemistry
Synchrotrons*

Substances

Macromolecular Substances

Grants and funding

The following funding is acknowledged: National Institutes of Health; US Department of Energy. The Center for BioMolecular Structure (CBMS) is primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) through a Center Core P30 Grant (P30GM133893), and by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research (KP1607011). As part of NSLS-II, a national user facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, work performed at the CBMS is supported in part by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences Program under contract number and DE-SC0012704.