The MD3 is a highly integrated diffractometer system (Figure 4), which includes features such as an air-bearing rotary axis, microscope system, sample illumination system, X-ray beam size defining aperture, Beamstop, etc.

Due to the extremely small X-ray focused beam size required for membrane protein line stations, with a minimum beam size of 1×0.5 μm², the diffractometer's SOC is required to be ≤0.1 μm. The MD3 is a high-precision diffractometer capable of meeting this requirement with an SOC of ≤0.1 μm.

The EIGER2 X-16M at BL17UM beamline (Figure 5) has a readout time of 7.5ms and can achieve a maximum frame rate of up to 133Hz. A key feature of this detector is its high collection frequency (up to 133Hz), which means it can collect a large amount of data in a very short time, making it crucial for rapidly acquiring crystal structure information.

Figure 5 Eiger2 X 16M High-Performance Area Detector

Protein crystal growth exhibits significant randomness, and discovering a high-quality crystal capable of yielding high-quality diffraction data requires screening from many crystals. The novel dual-gripper ISARA robotic arm (Figure 6) is designed to make sample loading and unloading more efficient, especially when dealing with a large number of samples, which can greatly save time. Utilizing an automated sample mounting robotic arm can increase the number of samples screened per hour to around 40.

Figure 6 New double gripper ISARA type robot