Goodbye, Charlie!
Sadly, today was Charlie Eigenbrot’s last PRT meeting, since he is retiring from Genentech in June. We will miss him! (But we do hope we comes back to visit us periodically at the synchrotron)
Back up and running
We are back up from the long ALS shutdown, and the beamlines are in good shape. We completed a number of projects on the sector 5 beamlines, in particular, as well as performed maintenance on a number of systems: – Pilatus3 6M installed on 5.0.1. The install went well, and…
Pilatus 6M now installed in 501
The next test is to run the 501 and 502 Pilatus detectors simultaneously off the same PPU.
Pin base warmer looking good
We measured the temperature at the sample during warming of the pin base, and preliminary tests so far show that the heat is not transferred to the loop during two minutes of base warming. Tests are continuing now to determine how well the warmer removes ice and frost from the bases.
Images of a crystal in a loop before and after using the pin base warmer:
It gets worse before it gets better
The robot dewars have been taken off of 502 and 503 in order to replace the motors and perform maintenance on the stages.
Pin base warmer is coming along…
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!
And… it works!
Marc collected a lysozyme dataset with the new Pilatus 6M detector. All modules are good. Thank you for reading!
New Pilatus 6M has arrived
a new SULI student at the BCSB
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.