Development of SPACE-II for rapid sample exchange at SPring-8 macromolecular crystallography beamlines

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Murakami, Hironori Hasegawa, Kazuya Ueno, Go Yagi, Naoto Yamamoto, Masaki Kumasaka, Takashi
Copyright Year	2020
Abstract	Reducing the sample-exchange time is a crucial issue in maximizing the throughput of macromolecular crystallography (MX) beamlines because the diffraction data collection itself is completed within a minute in the era of pixel-array detectors. To this end, an upgraded sample changer, SPACE-II, has been developed on the basis of the previous model, SPACE (SPring-8 Precise Automatic Cryo-sample Exchanger), at the BL41XU beamline at SPring-8. SPACE-II achieves one sample-exchange step within 16 s, of which its action accounts for only 11 s, because of three features: (i) the implementation of twin arms that enable samples to be exchanged in one cycle of mount-arm action, (ii) the implementation of long-stroke mount arms that allow samples to be exchanged without withdrawal of the detector and (iii) the use of a fast-moving translation and rotation stage for the mount arms. By pre-holding the next sample prior to the sample-exchange sequence, the time was further decreased to 11 s in the case of automatic data collection, of which the action of SPACE-II accounted for 8 s. Moreover, the sample capacity was expanded from four to eight Uni-Pucks. The performance of SPACE-II has been demonstrated in over two years of operation at BL41XU; the average number of samples mounted on the diffractometer in one day was increased from 132 to 185, with an error rate of 0.089%, which counted incidents in which users could not continue with an experiment without recovery work by entering the experimental hutch. On the basis of these results, SPACE-II has been installed at three other MX beamlines at SPring-8 as of July 2019. The fast and highly reliable SPACE-II is now one of the most important pieces of infrastructure for the MX beamlines at SPring-8, providing users with the opportunity to fully make use of limited beamtime with brilliant X-rays.
Starting Page	155
Ending Page	165
Page Count	11
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.1107/s2059798320000030
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://journals.iucr.org/d/issues/2020/02/00/wa5125/wa5125.pdf
PubMed reference number	32038046
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.1107/s2059798320000030
Journal	Medline
Volume Number	76
Journal	Acta crystallographica. Section D, Structural biology
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article