- Organization:
One person should coordinate the beamtime, make contact with the LC prior to the beamtime, if necessary, and distribute the information to the other participants. Your LC will be found from the email sent to you by Door and if there are changes the information will be provided to you. In any case your local contact will contact you before your experiment, if you have no urgent questions. - Onsite/remote-hybrid experiments: All participants who intend to do remote as part of the experiment need to be registered as 'remote' in Door. Otherwise, the remote access cannot be granted. If the participant wants to do both onsite and remote during the same experiment, please register as 'remote' user and let your LC know that you intend to additionally come on site.
- Safety declaration:
If samples are already in pucks and brought to the beamline in liquid nitrogen as protein crystals in loops, it is adequate to declare 'protein crystals' 'number of crystals' and 'harmless or toxic'. In case of toxic, please specify which component is toxic and location of the sample.
Other types of samples should be declared for the name of each substance, amount in ml and concentration for both the beamline and the lab, if selected to use. If you are uncertain how to proceed, please ask the beamline staff, we will forward your question to the safety managers or flag your declaration to be checked by the safety managers, who will comment if any additional actions are needed. - Dewars:
Please follow the instructions of dewar shipments as in our public webpage or user office webpage. Please use the form provided there, or other type of clear labelling, even if you bring the dewar to the rack yourself. Ideally, the dewar should be delivered before 08:30 on the morning of your experiment, to allow us to load all the pucks of the day into the sample changer in the morning. By default, all dewars in our rack will be refilled on Mondays and Fridays. Dewars should be cleared off from our rack within a reasonable time, a few days. in case the pucks can be thawed after the experiment, please let the LC know and preferably provide a container for removing the pucks. - Scheduling:
Beamline is scheduled twice a year, usually at the end of May and end of December. At this time, the beamtime Door invitations got to users with regular proposals, BAG coordinators, LTP coordinators and priority access users reserve dates that are blocked for all users of their proposal type. To secure the wished time slot, the reservation should be made as soon as possible. If the reserved slots are not taken 6 weeks prior to the beamtime, they will be assigned to users in overbooking queue or offered to anyone wanting beamtime (e.g. with short term proposals). If we get constant cancellations, we recommend not to make bookings, but approach us when the crystals are there. Occasional cancellations are fine, it's the benefit of everyone do cancel as soon as possible, if you cannot make use of the allocated time. - Annealing:
Annealing is working both remotely and on-site. Recently, the connected server needed a restart, to make the device functional again. Unfortunately, we did not know that there was a problem with the annealer, as it's rarely in use. It is very helpful if you report such problems to your local contact (e.g. via e-mail). - Robot:
Robot had gripper issues on second half of 2021; this has been resolved and the after a few difficulties at the start of the run 2022, the robot is now running stabile. If robot crashes in the middle of the night and users loose the beamtime, we can usually replace the time within a week. - Heatmap function in grid scans:
Has been re-implemented after Eiger installation with scoring based on program Dozor. - X-ray centring:
Will be implemented within MXCuBE if the current hardware allows. Testing in second half of 2022. - Serial crystallography:
Tape-drive sample delivery is available for users as a separate setup since 2020. The choice of crystallography or tapedrive setup is made during the proposal submission. BAG participants can have tapedrive beamtime by getting in contact with the beamline manager well in advance or by applying separately with a regular proposal and selecting tapedrive setup. Tapedrive beamtime is allocated in blocks, due to the setup time. Other possibilities for serial crystallography are use of various kinds of user provided chips (please talk to us about the compatibility with the gonio and operations in room temperature) or bringing your own setup, if feasible for space. - Databases:
ISPyB installation in combination with MXCuBE is ongoing, first features likely available during the second half of 2022. Other databases, such as Amarcord, can hook to ISPyB. - Data backup:
Do remember to backup your data at some point. The data are moved to tape after a time period after the beamtime and from where it can only be restored by asking separately. Even the tapes will not be saved forever. - Problems during the beamtime after on-call service:
If you have urgent problems during your beamtime after the on-call shift has already finished or the LC for the next day has yet started, you can send an email to p11beamline@desy.de. If anyone from the staff is available and able to help you, they will get back to you as soon as possible. If users loose their beamtime due to problems on the beamline, this can usually be replaced within a week. - Feedback:
Please do provide feedback of any malfunctions or non-urgent suggestions straight to your LC or through the Door feedback form. We are always trying to improve things and take user suggestions seriously in to account! - Informing the user community of any changes at P11:
We will do our best in informing any changes, like changing the image prefixes, on the beamline to our user community.
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