O
 

NECAT Beamline

The Northeastern Collaborative Access Team (NE-CAT) facility at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory is managed by Cornell University and consists of seven member institutions:

  • Columbia University
  • Cornell University
  • Harvard University
  • Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Rockefeller University
  • Yale University.

    • Primary funding for this project comes from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additional financial support for NE-CAT comes from the member institutions.

    Status of NE-CAT Sector 24 Activities

     

    October 2008 

     

    Beamline operations resumed on October 1, after a 1 ½ month long accelerator shutdown for preventative maintenance. Prior to turning over the beamlines to the users, NE- CAT reserved several days of operation in order for the monochromator to stabilize under its heat loading, optimizing the beamlines, and performing a number of tests to insure that the highest quality data will be obtained by the users. The energy calibration of the fixed-energy beamline 24-ID-E was checked again. This time the energy was determined by measuring a fluorescence scan using a selenium containing protein crystal. The energy was determined to be 12.662 keV to well within 1 eV, in agreement with earlier measurements. Also the position at which the beam hits the detector on each beamline, over the full limits of travel, was precisely determined to within 1 pixel by using a highly attenuated x-ray beam directly impinging onto the detector.

    We were able to take advantage of “a fire sale” to acquire additional capacity for our HP EVA-5000 data storage system because a large user returned several of these units to the vendor. Acquisition of the second data store adds 23TB more of storage to the original 30TB. The new unit is shown on the left of the original unit. We found it necessary to locate both data storage units in the engineering laboratory to avoid the very dusty environment of the experimental floor. Each unit is powered by separate UPS power supplies providing total redundancy. The GPFS software for both units was also updated to the most recent release.

    We have been informed by ACCEL that our new MD2 Microdiffractometer, destined to be installed on 24-ID-C in January 2009, has been shipped and expected to arrive during the first week in November.

    Users using 24-ID-C early in the current operating schedule were very heavy users of the sample placement robotic system. All users of the automated sample placement robotic system reported good operating experiences, with only a very few failures reported upon mounting or demounting samples.

     

     

    The numbers of PDB depositions and publications in major crystallographic journals based upon work performed using NE- CAT’s beamlines are now increasing rapidly. Of particular note, the paper of Jochen Zimmer, Yunsun Nam, and Tom Rapoport from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School titled “Structure of a complex of the ATPase SecA and the protein-translocation channel” was featured in the October 16 issue of Nature as well as on its cover page (seen here). The work was done using NE- CAT’s 24-ID-C beamline as well as SBC’s 19-ID beamline at APS and the NSLS’s X29 beamline.

     

     

     

    © 2005 Northeastern Collaborative Access Team

    Webmaster: Cyndi Salbego