BioSAXS

EMBL – in cooperation with scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht – has built a SAXS beamline oriented towards biology/soft condensed matter. It will provide a wide range of spatial resolutions from about 0.1 nm to 2000 nm and operate in the energy range from 4 to 20 keV. The focal spot on the detector will be 0.2 (horizontal) *0.06 (vertical) mm. The expected flux on the sample will be in the order of 10¹³ at wavelength resolution 3 *10^-4 (double crystal monochromator) and of order of 10¹⁵ at wavelength resolution 1*10^-2 (pink beam or multilayers). The sample environment unit on BioSAXS at PETRA III allows fast mixing of solutions for time resolved measurements and automatic change of samples for fast screening robotic sample loading (10 μL and filling cycle 20 sec) is incorporated at the beamline using a device being constructed in collaboration between EMBL (outstations in Grenoble and Hamburg) and ESRF.
The design of the instrument is shown in Fig. 1. The contribution of Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht was the construction of the 5 m detector stage which allows recording of different scattering angular regimes by automatically changing the sample to detector distance in minutes time scale. High quality scattering patterns are recorded with a modern PILATUS 2M pixel detector. This single photon counting detector combines a high dynamic count range with low noise readout.

First friendly users already collected data on several biological and biocolloidal systems at very low volumes. SAXS data of good quality and high performance are expected when the beamline reaches its final specifications. For future SAXS experiments with ultra-small sample volumes (< 1 nanoliter) microfluidic sample environments and fast mixing by stopped-flow technique are under development.

Eventually the end-station is fully automated (sample loading, data collection, processing and preliminary analysis) and will rapidly provide users standard data concerning the size of the scattering structures (radius of gyration and maximum dimension).
Upon operation of the beamline Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht is in charge of 15 % of the total beam time. This will be supported by personnel of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht and by contribution to the operation costs. Beside soft matter experiments aiming at the users visiting our SANS instrumentation at GEMS a strong focus will be on the bio-membrane related research which complements the protein and DNS focussed work performed at EMBL.

User operation on the BioSAXS beamline will start in April 2012.

Call for Proposals for Beamtime at BioSAXS

The call for proposals for beamtime at BioSAXS in May is now open. For the application of beamtime please fill the application form (see download links of Word and pdf documents below) and send it to Vasyl Haramus (

Deadline for proposal submission is the 31^st of March 2012.