Chemical Crystallography - Remote robot collection
- AS MX Wiki
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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!
Sample 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.
Even more fun videos of how the robot works!
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Before your beamtime
Mounting and cryo-cooling crystals
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You can use this handy puck tracking sheet for keeping track of which crystal goes in each port.
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Workflow
Relevant User Interfaces
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: Log on remotely
Log on to the Remote access pages for the beamlines. It is recommended to have more than one monitor.
Make sure you open the connection labelled with AXDV before you open ADXV for viewing your diffraction.
Step 2: Mount a crystal
Use the robot webpage to select the samples you want to mount. See Robot mounting and user interface for detailed instructions.
Step 3: 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.
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Step 4: Screening
Collect a small wedge of data to see if the crystals are worth collecting, instructions: Screening
Step 5: Strategy
Use the results from screening to calculate the optimum Strategy for your collection.
Step 6: Collect dataset
Collect your perfect and beautiful Collecting a Dataset
Step 7: View processing results and solution
Check your results and decide if you want to collect again for higher quality data or to achieve more data. Data Processing
This can be done via the data processing webpage, but to find more information, you will want to view the initial solution, which is in the CXASAP-Brute folder in the folder for your dataset. See CX - accessing and analysing data on the beamline CX - accessing and analysing data on the beamlinefor how to find your data and CXASAP on MX for information on how to find your CXASAP results.
Later steps
Prepare your structure for publication
Import the relevant synchrotron information into your cif, from the autoprocess.cif file generated for each dataset: CIF file entries
Reference the synchrotron and relevant software: Publishing MX data
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