Motivation

Synchrotron Radiation Macromolecular Crystallography has been on the forefront of biological studies requiring access to structural information. It has seen several major updates and upgrades ranging from sample standards, robotic sample changers, micro-focus beamlines, pixel array detectors to distributed and automated data processing, and the list goes on. In the last few years, several major facilities began operation and a few more were upgraded to what is the state of the art today. Along these upgrades, all facilities have updated and upgraded equipment, high performance computing and the associated software to allow researchers to continue pursuing the most impactful areas of life science research. In the coming years, more facilities will be upgraded, including two in the US.

All of these advances are required for groups from academia and industry to increase their rate of discovery, relying on either the brightest beams to tackle the most challenging projects, or higher level of automation, so that researchers can not only achieve more, but most importantly can invest valuable time tackling the difficult projects and rely on automation for their other projects.

In this workshop, we will have presentations dealing with sample automation and standards, presentations about high data rate MX analysis as well as on user interfaces and remote access. In all sessions, we will emphasize the current state of the art and planned upgrades. Ideally, we would like the spirit of the workshop to be cooperative, even sparking collaborations to elaborate common solutions to deal with common problems.

We encourage individuals working at Synchrotron facilities worldwide to register as presenters and welcome all to participate in the discussions.