NSLS-II Seminar

The trio of macromolecular crystallography beamlines constructed by General Medicine and Cancer (GM/CA) Institutes at the APS has been in growing demand due to their outstanding micro crystallography capabilities. To raise the efficiency of these beamlines a significant effort has been put into designing fast, convenient, intuitive and robust beamline controls that could easy accommodate new beamline developments and provide high level of automation. This resulted in a system combining the widely praised user interface of SSRL BluIce as a frontend and the industrial power of EPICS as a backend. While the GM/CA controls have the look and feel of BluIce, their software design is very different making them faster, simpler and more flexible than most similar systems.
The report will reveal the key design solutions implemented in JBluIce and discuss some automations making JBluIce highly praised by the crystallographic community: one-click change between 5, 10 and 20μm beam sizes; one-click beamline energy change that may involve switching undulator harmonics, mirrors lanes and beam realignment; automated diffraction rastering for finding small crystals and 'sweet' spots on poorly diffracting crystals with automated scoring of raster cells by the number of reflections; data collection along a vector; automated on-the-fly fluorescent rastering, a faster and lower-irradiation compliment to the diffraction rastering; fully automated fluorescence measurements for MAD that include signal optimization, fast on-the-fly energy scanning and automated adaption of scan range to chemical shifts; fly-scan minibeam realignment; automated loop and crystal centering, controls for sample automounter, automated screening, data collection auditing, remote access and a lot more.