Where to put that Pilatus?

The BCSB is planning on starting a monthly User Forum to solicit feedback from users on the current and future use of the beamlines. We’d love to hear from you about the direction that the BCSB should be taking in terms of beamline upgrades, features, and general operations. If you are interested in participating in the forum, please contact Corie Ralston.

Several BCSB staff teamed up with other ALS beamline scientists to represent the ALS at this year’s American Crystallographic Association meeting in Denver. In the picture are from left to right: Christine Beavers, Simon Morton, Diane Bryant, Stacey Ortega, Jay Nix, Corie Ralston:

A special welcome to our SULI student, Sayan Roychowhury, who is majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He is here with us for the fall term, and writing code to process visual images of protein crystals and center them automatically in the x-ray beam. SULI is the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program in which the host lab (in this case, LBNL) pays for a student to work for a few months to gain experience at a national lab and to encourage students to remain in STEM fields.

Anthony installed the first pin base warmer on 5.0.2 today. We have to wait until the ALS has LN restored before we can test it. One thing to note: the people we spoke to at NE-CAT about their pin base warmer told us that it does not actually solve the icing issue completely. They still do see pins move on the goniometer after mounting. Hopefully the warmer will help a bit, though!

Recently, Marc helped a user run some crystals which the user had arranged to have grown in zero-gravity. Here are pictures of the crystal capillaries mounted at the beamline, and the raster grid used to locate crystals within a capillary.