BEAMLINE GUIDE
Diamond VMXi Beamline

The Versatile Macromolecular Xtallography in situ (VMXi) beamline is dedicated to room temperature data collection from macromolecular crystals. It is an entirely automated facility for characterisation of, and data collection directly from, crystallisation experiments in situ. VMXi operates at fixed energy and offers a micro-focus beam with pink beam characteristics.

Key advantages of in situ diffraction:

• Experiments can be carried out without any manipulation of individual crystals, thus preserving crystal
  integrity - from dehydration, manual handling, cold shock and the impact of cryoprotectant.
• High quality room temperature structures can be determined routinely by automated merging of datasets
  from several crystals.
• In situ data provides feedback on the diffraction, crystal quality and, in many cases, unit-cell parameters
  and space group, even in the case of micro-crystals (10-15 μm), allowing effective optimisation of
  crystallisation conditions.
• Structural data is collected at near physiological conditions.

VMXi Capabilities

Currently VMXi offers:

• Oscillation experiments (up to 60 degrees of data / crystal) for crystals >10 μm with automatic data
  processing, merging and intensity based clustering, with results accessed via  Synchweb .
• Grid scans over a user-defined area to assess diffraction quality and with data analysed as serial
  crystallography (SSX) data.
• Ligand fitting pipeline from user provided SMILES code.

Which can help you with the following experiment types:

• Room temperature data collection including ligand/ fragment studies.
• Optimisation of crystallisation conditions.
• Data collection on samples sensitive to cryocooling/ handling.
• Multi crystal analysis with clustering to identify different structures within crystal populations.
• Serial data collection via grid scans.

We recommend the following tools for their compatibility and ease-of-use.

Convenient kits of compatible assemblies of MiTeGen recommended products

Beamline Sample Preparation Kits are available in 3 aperture size assortments based on your crystal sizes and include:

• Assemblies of 100 Crystal Mounts, on 18 mm pins, available in the following assortment:
  • 20 x Dual-Thickness MicroLoops ™ LD  (5 each of 10, 20, 30 and 50 μm aperture sizes)
  • 40 x Dual-Thickness MicroMount ™ (10 each of 75, 100, 150 and 200 μm aperture sizes)
  • 20 x Dual-Thickness MicroLoops ™  (5 each of 300, 400, 500 and 600 μm aperture sizes)
  • 20 x MicroMeshes ™  (5 each of 10, 25, 50 and 25L μm aperture sizes)
• Installed in 100 B5-R reusable bases or 100 regular bases
• Packaged and stored in 5 MiTeGen base holders

Uni-puck Starter Kit 2 includes:

• (7) Universal V-1 Pucks
• (1) Double Puck Loading Dewar with Lid
• (1) Puck Wand
• (1) Puck Dewar Loading Tool
• (1) Puck Separator Tools
• (1) Shelved Puck Shipping Cane
• (1) Bent Cryo-Tong
• (1) Cryo Express Dry Shipper (CX100)
• (1) Shipping case for CX100

*custom kits are available, contact MiTeGen with specific requests.