Diamond Light Source
Beamline VMXi - Versatile Macromolecular Crystallography (in situ)

The Versatile Macromolecular X-tallography in-situ(VMXi) beamline is an entirely automated facility for characterisation of, and data collection directly from, crystallisation experiments in situ.

There are four key advantages of in situ diffraction:
  • Experiments can be carried out without any manipulation of individual crystals, thus preserving the crystal integrity.
  • It provides immediate feedback on the diffraction, crystal quality and, in many cases, unit-cell parameters, space group, even in the case of micro-crystals (2-5 μm).
  • The method can be fully automated with high reliability.
  • It provides a route for data collection from crystals that consistently lose all diffraction when conventionally harvested, or else are hazardous and may not be harvested for safety reasons.

contacts
Diamond User Office
Techniques
Diffraction
  • Crystallography
  • Crystallography (biological macromolecules)
Emission or Reflection
  • X-ray fluorescence (XRF)
control/Data analysis
Control Software Type
  • ISPyB
Data Output Type
  • Images
Data Output Format
  • hdf5