NEW MPW MAD10 BEAMLINE HAS SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED ITS COMMISSIONING PROGRAM

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NEW MPW MAD10 BEAMLINE HAS SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED ITS COMMISSIONING PROGRAM
29 November 2004 - CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory

The new MPW MAD10 beamline has successfully completed its commissioning program during AP42 (March-October 2004). The station is characterized by the new MAR desktop beamline with CryoSampleChanger capable of storing up to 19 samples at time. The DTB has been integrated with the MAR225 Mosaic detector for macromolecular crystallography and by the C-TRAIN solid state fluorescence detector for MAD/EXAFS experiments.

The commissioning period has been characterized by many research highlights including the following:

In May 2004 the our ability to scan any absorption edge between 0.9-2.5 Å was used by Dave Stuart's group from Oxford University to clearly identify manganese (Mancini EJ et al, Cell, 118,743-55 (2004)) and by RB Williams from LMB-MRC (Cambridge, UK) to locate sulfur atoms by anomalous diffraction (Developmental Cell, 7, 559-569 (2004)).

Structures at atomic resolution are such sought after and have become the "Gold Standard" for structure determination. The first atomic structure on beamline 10 was achieved on Azurin II, which is implicated in the donation of electrons to nitrite reductases in denitrifying bacteria. Several azurin II structures have already been published; however Paraskevopoulos et al. from Daresbury Laboratory were able to collect the first atomic resolution structure of the protein.

This work confirmed that MPW10 is providing users with the brightest beam at SRS. An industrial group collected data on MPW10 as part of a benchmarking effort on the new beamline. They were able to extend the resolution of their data set to 1.9Å compared to data collected on 14.2, where very similar crystals diffracted to 2.3Å.

So far two new structures have been solved by Se-MAD. One of these is from Dr. Fusinita van den Ent and Dr. Jan Lowe (LMB-MRC) the first group to test the MAD capability of MPW10. They collected data overnight on Friday and by the evening of the following Sunday they were able to state 'The structure is basically solved. The native is 2.8 Å, we couldn't get anything better, but that should be enough. The density is gorgeous!'

Overall the output for MPW10 during its commissioning time is of 2 new structures solved by Se-MAD (unpublished), 1 new structure solved by molecular replacement (unpublished), 2 high impact pubblications for work on anomalous scatterers, and 2 high resolution structures (unpublished), plus other data collected.

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About: CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory
DARTS is a unique service offering solutions to materials characterisation problems that are unattainable in the conventional laboratory. This is possible because it makes use of the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS). Advantages of using the SRS include:

• The ability to study small or weakly diffracting samples. Improved resolution, enabling structures intractable in the home laboratory to be solved.

• The ability to select the optimum wavelength for a particular application.

• Additional specialised techniques only possible using synchrotron radiation can be exploited.

The DARTS team's ability to access and combine a range of complementary techniques provides information to help manufacturers control processing conditions and modify manufacturing techniques to improve a wide range of products. Even the everyday crisp packet has benefited from DARTS leading edge technology.

Applications can cover materials from agrochemicals, pigments, polypeptides, microporous materials, organometallics, catalyst materials, minerals and samples from processing plants.

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