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-nb0M
Before 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.
Data Collection
Step 0: Experimental setup
For chemical crystallography collections, there are a few things you should check before starting to collect:
Cryojet should be out and in Pause. Otherwise this will cast a shadow on the detector. Open the Cryo tab of the MX1 or MX2 Controls GUI to check this
Cryojet is at 100 K. Check this also on Cryo tab of the MX1 or MX2 Controls GUI.
Energy is set to 17.44 keV. This will give you maximum resolution. Check this on MX1 Controls or MX2 Controls
CX is selected in CAP user changer.
Detector distance is set to the minimum for Screening and Collection, to give you the maximum resolution for the given energy.
105 mm for MX1
110 mm for MX2
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.