What is it about?
Automation of the mounting of cryo-cooled crystals is now a feature of any beamline dedicated to Macromolecular Crystallography (MX). This paper describes a fully autonomous system that forms the core automation for the ESRF beamline MASSIF-1 - a beamline that performs experiments by itself.
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Why is it important?
Sample changers have been used at beamlines for many years but the need for manual interventions to recover from small errors has made the possibility of fully autonomous data collection unworkable. This paper describes a robot that has been designed to work autonomously by being able to escape from most errors and continue without delays. It is unique as it is both a robotic sample changer and a high prescision goniometer in a single device allowing the system to control the entire experiment from sample selection to data collection. It is the core automation on the world's first completely autonomous beamline, MASSIF-1.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: RoboDiff: combining a sample changer and goniometer for highly automated macromolecular crystallography experiments, Acta Crystallographica Section D Structural Biology, July 2016, International Union of Crystallography,
DOI: 10.1107/s205979831601158x.
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Resources
MASSIF-1 : Rise of the robots transforms MX
MASSIF-1 is a world leading unique facility for the fully automatic, high throughput characterisation and data collection from macromolecular crystals.
MASSIF-1: a beamline dedicated to the fully automatic characterization and data collection from crystals of biological macromolecules
Description of the beamline where the experiments are carried out
Beamline twitter account
Follow the beamline twitter account for automated updates on crystal sizes and volumes for the week and links to updates and tips for using the beamline
Fully automatic macromolecular crystallography: the impact of MASSIF-1 on the optimum acquisition and quality of data
Review of a year of operation of MASSIF-1 showing the autonomous system can collect better data than humans
The story of MASSIF-1
Short video on how Sanofi-Aventis have used MASSIF-1, a collaborative effort between ESRF and EMBL on the Grenoble Giant Campus
Fully automatic characterisation and data collection
Description of the algorithms used to locate centre and collect data automatically
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