This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Improve speed, reliability, and versatility of automounters ? Investigators: Schneider, Soares Objectives ?The major objective stated in the recent renewal proposal was to fabricate one additional automounter, and to deploy it and an existing one. There are several minor objectives: we will create adaptors for the Rigaku Actor pucks and modify two of our automounters for Uni-Puck ?Actor puck intercompatibility, we will employ data-matrix readers to automate firm identification of specimens and to provide a link between the PXDB and user's LIMS, we will develop a multilayered automounter status analysis and forecasting client, we will quicken the crystal-cap drying to shorten dead time in the crystal screening duty cycle and we will develop a fast gripper-reconditioning method to eliminate delays in payload changes. Results ?The PXRR automounters are in frequent and increasing use and work highly reliably. In 2009 11,300 data collections were carried out on robotically mounted crystals, an increase of 50% over the previous year. This trend continues, particularly at X29, where new user groups keep adopting the method. No specimen was lost this year, which indicates both good performance of the machines and proficiency of experimenters in reliably preparing automounter compatible specimens. Owing to its role as a screening station, 43% of the 2009 sweeps at the X12C bending magnet beamline were of auto-mounted crystals, often yielding best-in-lot crystals for high resolution collections at the X29 ID line using our 'quick access'scheduling mechanism. These transfers to another beamline, and possibly another robot, are a great convenience for investigators, allowing them to make the most of their visit. Beamline transfers are a good metric to demonstrate that our closed specimen dewars succeed in preventing ice accumulation or specimen degradation during repeated machine assisted mounting cycles. Of course, continued optimization of the speed of specimen cycling by the tuning of hardware and programming is the other key factor favoring specimen integrity. Here, the minimally articulated ALS automounter has a performance advantage (mounting in under 3 seconds) that is hard to match by other automounter designs. Operationally, the challenge in the past year, the first year since the departure of our engineer, was to re-create a competent and confident robot-support team. Remarkably, our professional and technical staff achieved just that. However, for the time we decided to retrench on two engineering-intensive specific aims, namely the modification of at least one automounter to achieve compatibility with Rigaku's Actor pucks, and the introduction of barcode readers to decipher marked crystal caps. Considering the prospect for remote use of our beamlines, we try to establish demand for barcode readers, which might provide off-site operators with unambiguous specimen identification. Technically, the main achievement in the past year was the fabrication in our shop of a more robust and more precise 'gripper'. These are the tool heads that, in the dewar, must have the raw power to pick any style of crystal cap even off the strong magnets of 'unipucks.'On the goniometer they must have the concentricity and precision to meet its magnet platform precisely before letting the crystal cap snap down gently. All our robots were retrofitted with these improved soft mounting grippers, and we have fabricated some for other laboratories. Other automounter upgrades include new cap dryers to quickly de-ice and dry freshly mounted specimens, new methods to speed up the changing of the payload of specimen dewars, and new methods to couple robot positioning more closely to that of the diffractometer table. The incorporation of automounter operation into our CBASS experiment control software has also evolved. A reliable, yet simple, status reporter software is available when desired, complete with warning and information popup windows. We streamlined automounter protocols further to allow staff to launch and direct automounter operation with ease. For the user, a straightforward and web-based puck definition path in our PXDB provides them with a planning and recording method ahead of beamline visits, and other auto-generated branches in the PXDB journal the administrative and crystallographic progress of an experimental session. Plans ?Heeding our advisors and requests by user groups, we will deploy quickly an additional automounter at the X25 ID beamline. This will complete the outfitting of PXRR beamlines with the basic equipment needed by many of our visitors, and allow us to schedule experiments more flexibly that require the performance of insertion-device beams. While the automounter itself is largely constructed, and is virtually identical to the one at X29, its kinematical stand is just now in fabrication. This stand, like the one at X12C, will track the motions of the goniostat precisely during beam alignments, and, just like at X12C, will keep the pneumatic knocks of robotic actions isolated from the micro diffractometer. We also plan a day-and-a-half workshop on Frontiers in Automated Crystal Handling and Visualization as part of the NSLS/CFN users meeting of May 2010. Its goal is not only to help us assess our plans for the near future at NSLS, but more importantly, to learn about emerging methods in automation that will define MX at NSLS-II, particularly developments in machine-assisted crystal harvesting. Significance ?Reliable automounters when supported by a competent resident staff are important to several of our most productive and loyal visiting scientists, as well as an increasing number of groups that simply show up with their specimen in robot pucks, ready to take advantage of automated methods. Recent observation of the work of two well-established laboratories, focused on solving numerous structures of membrane proteins and ribosomes, show that automounters are accelerating the structure-solving process in ways we did not recognize just years ago, when we thought of screening and data collection as separate and sequential processes. The several hundred specimens that these groups test during each visit ?more than 400 in one instance ?are contiguous screening sessions interrupted by collections whenever diffraction quality warrants it. Software designed to score diffraction quality increasingly assists experimenters in their crystallographic decision making. These developments define a challenge for hardware and software designers to create faster and more competent methods to accelerate and automate basic data collection techniques further. Particularly important in working towards these goals is to create the tools that will match the unprecedented framing rate and quality of fine-sliced diffraction images that the pixel array detector will produce at X25 by next year, and on an even more breath-taking scale by 2015 at NSLS-II.
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