A beamline that runs experiments by itself
What is it about?
This paper describes the motivation, design, realization and first six months of operation of MASSIF-1, a beamline used to study the structure of medically important proteins. What makes this beamline special is that the experiments have been completely automated meaning that users do not need to come to the beamline or operate it remotely. This allows them to spend more time on studying the biology while the robot works through the night
Why is it important?
MASSIF-1, the first beamline of the Massively Automated Sample Selection Integrated Facility, is jointly operated by ESRF and EMBL, in Grenoble. This ground-breaking tool provides European structural biologists with a fully automated service for sample evaluation and data collection from crystals of macromolecules. Scientists feed their experimental requirements into the beamline software while their samples enter a queuing system. The crystals are then located and screened automatically, and the data acquired without any human intervention.