Current Calls

Please see below for details of the current User Programme Calls from eBIC.

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In collaboration Rosalind Franklin Institute & Diamond are pleased to announce a commissioning call for researchers to access the cryo volume imaging capabilities of the Helios Hydra cryoPFIB/SEM housed at Diamond.

The Helios Hydra is the latest generation plasma FIB/SEM from ThermoFisher and has some unique capabilities Helios Hydra 5 DualBeam:

• Optimised for cryo temperatures.
• Latest generation multi-gas species plasma FIB (argon, nitrogen, oxygen and xenon) source greatly increased the processivity of the instrument.
• Equipped with the Elstar electron column, which is optimised for low kV imaging and in combination with the ETD and TLD detectors operated in immersion mode provides highest quality SEM images (Dumoux et al, 2022).
• SerialFIB and Auto-Slice and View software for automated volume data collection (Klumpe et al., 2021, eLife).

These capabilities are being developed through a tripartite collaboration between the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Diamond and ThermoFisher Scientific funded by the Wellcome Trust and EPSRC. This call aims to provide a platform for the wider user community to experience serial cryoPFIB/SEM volume imaging on the Helios Hydra (Dumoux, 2022) and will help inform the collaboration partners on the wider user requirements/desire for this type of experiment in the future.

Please select the Rapid access route and Helios instrument when you submit your proposal. 
Proposals are also open to existing BAG PIs.

Proposals will be reviewed by eBIC staff (the Rosalind Franklin Institute has no part in the review process) with a view to schedule beamtime from August/September 2023.

Download the PDF for more details on requirements and visit structure: Helios Hydra call.

Submit your proposal

• For lamella preparation on frozen cells and microcrystals

• On-grid FIB milling only

• Rapid and BAG access

For more information please see here (download).

We are pleased to offer access to extensive GPU resources for computational projects relating to data collections at eBIC in partnership with the Baskerville computing facility (https://www.baskerville.ac.uk/). This is aimed at providing computational resource for the analysis of data collected at eBIC.

Baskerville is a Tier 2 HPC facility based at the University of Birmingham with a focus on providing GPU compute capability. The cluster consists of 52 compute nodes with a total of 208 Nvidia A100 GPUs. These nodes have 512GB RAM each. More hardware specifications can be found at https://docs.baskerville.ac.uk/system/.

A list of software currently available on the Baskerville system can be found at https://apps.baskerville.ac.uk/. If these applications do not meet project requirements, then reasonable installation requests can be put into Baskerville for consideration. Baskerville provides a web portal for using the RELION GUI. CryoSPARC is not available on the system at present.

High speed data transfer from the DLS file system of data collected at eBIC is available via Globus. Both raw data and the results of eBIC’s automated processing pipeline would be transferred to your Baskerville project upon the completion of the data collection. Results from processing on Baskerville would need to be transferred and stored at your home institution.

Projects would last for 6 months offering 7TB of storage and 2500 GPU hours. There is the possibility of adjusting these values should your project require that.

Applications should be submitted through the rapid access route. Guidance can be found here (guidance PDF download)

If you have any enquiries please contact daniel.hatton@diamond.ac.uk