Welcome to VMXm

VMXm is a micro/nanofocus Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) beamline designed for atomic structure determination in situations where producing large quantities of material or sufficiently large crystals is challenging. In addition to experiments on protein samples, VMXm is also capable of collecting data from difficult chemical crystallography samples, where preparing large crystals for traditional X-ray crystallography is not feasible.

The X-ray beam size on VMXm can be adjusted to match the size of the crystal being measured, minimizing background scatter from surrounding material. Additionally, measurements are conducted under vacuum to further reduce background noise. This enables the detection of diffracted signals from crystals as small as sub-micron in size.

The ability to tune the X-ray energy allows us to exploit photoelectron escape within microcrystals at higher energies. With the CdTe Eiger detector the quantum efficiency is also improved at higher energies . These two factors lead to prolonged lifetime of crystals in the beam and gives the potential to collect data from fewer crystals.