Michael Becker

TL;DR: A unique triple-collimator apparatus, which has been in routine use on both undulator beamlines since February 2008, allows users to rapidly interchange the focused beam and conditioned mini-beams of two sizes with a single mouse click, has greatly facilitated sample screening and resulted in several structures that could not have been obtained with the larger focused beam.

TL;DR: Automated scanning capabilities have been added to the data acquisition software, JBluIce-EPICS, at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Cancer Institute Collaborative Access Team (GM/CA CAT) at the Advanced Photon Source.

TL;DR: An X-ray mini-beam of 8 × 6 µm cross-section was used to collect diffraction data from protein microcrystals with volumes as small as 150–300‵m3 to investigate the benefits of this technique for experiments with small crystals and with large inhomogeneous crystals.

TL;DR: The ways in which BluIce was combined with EPICS and converted into the Java-based JBluIce are described, the solutions aimed at streamlining and speeding up operations are discussed and an overview of the tools that are provided by this new open-source control system for facilitating crystallographic experiments is given.

TL;DR: The potential of second-harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy for automated crystal centering to guide synchrotron X-ray diffraction of protein crystals was explored and the general insensitivity of SHG images to optical scatter enabled the reliable identification of microcrystals within opaque cryocooled lipidic mesophases that were not identified by conventional bright-field imaging.