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

     

    June 2008 

    APS resumed user operations on June 10 after a scheduled six week accelerator maintenance shut down. The NE- CAT support group scheduled the first two days of operation to allow the accelerator to reach a stable operating condition and to set up both beamlines to insure that users will obtain the highest quality data possible. Both of NE- CAT’s operating insertion device beamlines were totally booked during the remainder of June and operated flawlessly during this entire period. Unfortunately this was not the case for the accelerator. From June 25-27 APS had considerable difficulty injecting beam into the storage ring during the top up operating mode, with many outages and decay of the current when APS was able to inject beam into the storage ring. The major source of the problem was identified to be the power supply for the kicker magnet. This magnet “bumps” the electron beam out of the 7 GeV synchrotron into the storage ring. In spite of the outages and varying beam intensity, the NE- CAT users scheduled during this period were able to obtain their data- but with some difficulty.

     

    User Experiences

     Of the many researchers and groups using NE- CAT’s beamlines during this month, we would like to briefly describe one group that conducted a “new” experiment on the beamline. Dr. Valarie Sim MD (from the NIH Rocky Mountain Laboratory) accompanied David Eisenberg’s group to the beamline and conducted some early exploratory experiments to study the fibrous nature of mouse prion protein particles. Such a study required being conducted under a BSL2 protocol at APS and represented the first BSL2 experiment conducted on a NE- CAT’s beamline.

    The following photograph on the left shows the special safety equipment required to be used. From left to right are the portable hazardous waste sink, the BSL2 rated glove box, and a portable emergency eye wash station. The photo on the right shows shows Dr. Valerie Sim removing the samples from their shipping container. To the right assisting Dr. Sim are Dulio Cascio and Michael Sawaya (from David Eisenberg’s group).

     

    The experiment was conducted safely, although the results were inconclusive. Dr. Sim is scheduled to return in mid-July to try to obtain more definitive results.

     

    New Co-Axial Crystal Visualizer  

    Users previously have praised the quality of the crystal imaging system on the 24-ID-C beamline- until the installation of the MD2 microdiffractometer on 24-ID-E with its far superior co-axial crystal imaging system. Consequently, we have proceeded to develop a co-axial (co-axial with the x-ray beam) crystal image visualizer as shown in the following photograph undergoing final bench testing.  

     

    A commercially available microscope was configured in a right angle configuration. A 2mm hole was successfully drilled through three lenses and the 90 degree mirror and the lenses and mirror mounted into their holders. A molybdenum tube was inserted through the hole in the lens-mirror assembly to protect the glass from radiation damage by scattered x-rays.   A 40 micron crystal loop (used earlier in a beamline experiment and containing remnants of a crystal) is shown on the computer screen. Remnants of the crystal as small as 5 microns can be easily seen. Experiments have shown that the microscope performs very well with a zoom range of X12 with the quality of the image and its performance rivaling that of the MD2, at 1/10 of the cost. We plan to mount this new microscope on the 24-ID-C beamline in September. The microscope will then be moved to the 24-BM beam line in January 2009 when the new MD2 is installed on 24-ID-C.    

    New Staff Members Have Arrived

    With two insertion device beamlines now in full operation and the bending magnet beamline soon to be in operation, NE- CAT has recently added three more beamline support scientists to its staff. Shown in the following photograph are the new arrivals.  

     

    From left to right, Jon Schuermann who joined NE- CAT in May, received his Ph.D degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia and most recently has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center. Kay Perry received her Ph.D from Northwestern and most recently has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. David Neau received his Ph.D from Purdue and has been employed at the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices at Louisiana State University where he has been operating a CAMD beamline. Both Dave and Kay arrived at NE- CAT in mid June.

     

    New User Software Being Developed

    "Alloy”, is an open source program for the collection and processing of segmented datasets currently under development by Frank Murphy of our staff (shown on the left). With the availability of extremely intense microbeams, more datasets are being collected using multiple sweeps of data and multiple crystals and processing of this data into a single coherent data set can be a challenging task. Alloy uses best in class programs for data processing and analysis, and provides a simple front end that is designed to facilitate multi-segment data processing. Data statistics are presented as simply as possible to enable rapid decision making by the user. Alloy is not merely an interface. Among its features are a novel data collection strategy tool to optimize dataset completion and the presentation of additional statistics such as Rpim for scaling and I/sig(I) value tracking for integration. Alloy is currently nearing an alpha release stage, and will eventually be freely available.

     

     

     

     

     

    © 2005 Northeastern Collaborative Access Team

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