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MX services

Technique

Sample preparation and screening

The Industrial Liaison MX team at Diamond offers services for soluble and membrane protein crystallisation and harvesting.  This includes membrane protein purification and quality control.

Data collection

Our data collection service comes with a range of options to ensure you get the most out of your experiment.  Our highly qualified and experienced team of MX specialists will help you to get started with your experiment and will be available for technical support during your experiment. They will help you to select the most appropriate approach from a wide choice of specialised MX research instruments available. You may wish our team to perform the experiment on your behalf or would prefer to perform the research yourself or with your own team; either way, we have a wide range of access options to suit your needs.

Contract research

Our Contract Research service includes data collection and data analysis. Essentially, you send us the sample(s), our highly qualified and experienced staff collect the data, perform the appropriate analysis (in discussion with you), and then send you a clear and accessible report explaining the results. 

There's no need for you to fully understand how a synchrotron works, or even the finer details of the technique, we'll take care of that. If you would like to come to Diamond and see the experiment take place, you are welcome to do so. If you'd prefer to wait for the report, that's great too.
 

Access modes

Unattended data collection (UDC)

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How it works

UDC provides a well-established, fast, and flexible method for automating data collection. It offers the most efficient and cost-effective option for all standard MX experiments using 'reasonable quality' macromolecular crystals and is the preferred option for most of our industrial users. When registering your samples, simply select the most suitable experiment type and provide us with basic data collection parameters. The UDC pipeline will use the X-ray beam to automatically align the crystals and collect high-quality data from your samples.

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Perfect for

  • Projects requiring data collection across a large number of crystals eg. studies searching for the highest-resolution crystal ligand binding
  • Rapid feedback on a well-characterised system from a small number of new crystals

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Benefits

  • Rapid scheduling – samples are added to a queue and can be uploaded as soon as a slot is available
  • No user input required during beamtime – our team takes care of data collection on your behalf.
  • Uses standardised data collection protocols, which have been optimised for each Diamond beamline

Remote access

Remote

How it works

This option allows you to collect data yourself by accessing the beamline via an interactive remote connection.

Remote

Perfect for

This route is best suited for more challenging non-standard MX experiments, such as testing new crystals where diffraction quality is unknown, collecting data for difficult phasing, or if there are specific microfocus beam requirements.

Remote

Benefits

Remote access allows you to send us the samples and then collect the data from practically anywhere, without the need for travel. One of our experienced team will be responsible for uploading your samples at Diamond while you connect your computer to Diamond's network and control the research instrument remotely. This option allows a greater number of people to participate in the experiments. You could even share your beamtime with colleagues elsewhere in the world.

Mail in

MailIn

How it works

With this approach, you send us the sample(s) and our highly qualified and experienced staff collect the data for you, exactly as you would do the measurements yourself. We then provide the data in a suitable format, along with a clear, accessible report outlining the experimental details—ready for your analysis.

MailIn

Perfect for

  • Performing routine measurements, or measurements you haven't run before.
  • You simply need an experienced pair of hands.
  • If you do not have the time to conduct the experiment yourself.

MailIn

Benefits

Quick and easy Rest assured you are in the safe hands of experienced scientists Can be built into your routine pipeline.

Related techniques

Fragment Screening - XChem
Crystallisation Facilities
Cryo-Electron Microscopy at eBIC for Industry
Cryo-soft X-ray tomography (cryo-SXT)
Protein SAXS (bioSAXS)

Want to know more?

Get in Touch