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Background - Why use the robot?
Advantages of remote access robot mounting:
Convenience – no need to travel.
Easier to split shift between more people.
Pre-mounting crystals can save precious beamtime.
Very reactive crystals can be mounted in a fume hood in your lab.
Some crystals can crack, shatter, or degrade in quality when transported by air or road to get to the synchrotron.
Faster – no need to lock up hutch every time, wait for detector to move etc.
Good for standard crystallography
When to still handmount crystals:
Non-standard experiments
Very difficult crystals, where you may need to mount 10-20 crystals and base mounting decisions on diffraction data.
Using synchrotron equipment to mount (cold-mount, humidity control, gases etc.)
When you need advice and assistance from beamline staff.
Background - Introduction to the AS pucks and tools
This video is from when the Australian Synchrotron pucks were first introduced. Enjoy the music!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJltEp-nb0MSample handling at the Synchrotron
Watch below for how your pucks are loaded into puck adapters to be transferred to the robot dewar. Make sure you turn on captions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBugXWGLPTkBefore your beamtime
Mounting and cryo-cooling crystals
You can use this handy puck tracking sheet for keeping track of which crystal goes in each port.
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Step 1: Mount a crystal
Use the robot webpage to select the samples you want to mount. See Robot mounting and user interface for detailed instructions.
You can view the position of your pucks via the puck information webpage.
Step 2: Rastering
If you can’t find your crystal on the loop, use Rastering to find it by diffraction. Skip this step if you can see your crystal. Rastering is not really necessary on MX1 since the beam is very large.
Step 3: Screening
Collect a small wedge of data to see if the crystals are worth collecting, instructions: Screening
Step 4: Strategy
Use the results from screening to calculate the optimum Strategy for your collection.
Step 5: Collect dataset
Collect your perfect and beautiful Dataset
Step 6: View processing results
Check your results and decide if you want to collect again for higher quality data or to achieve more data.