June 2024 ESRFnews

10

INSIGHT

Has STREAMLINE also benefitted

industry?

Yes, hugely. According to Ennio

Capria, the ESRF’s deputy head

of business development, there is

a move towards following proof-

of-concept experiments with high-

throughput operando studies, which

will give industry scientists sufficient

knowledge to create “digital twins”

of their prototype systems. And

thanks to STREAMLINE funding,

this is already happening. At the

BM23 beamline, a robotic system

co-developed with the University of

Montpellier in France can scan 160

samples per hour. Another system,

co-developed with the chemical

company BASF at the ID31 beamline,

has scanned 9000 samples in six

months, and has won the favour of

six unique clients including a new

startup

Whats next

Technically the EU project concluded

in May this year but its legacy will be

felt for years to come as part of a wider

evolution away from techniquedriven

to problemdriven science Thanks a

lot to everyone who has contributed

said Krisch But its not over There is

life beyond STREAMLINE

Jon Cartwright

are, they can benefit from a new,

meta-workflow system, Ewoks, which

allows for highly tailored, automated

workflows, with data processing that

is more reproducible and concordant

with FAIR (traceable) principles.

Together with ICAT, a new open-

source metadata management system,

Ewoks aims to shorten the time between

experiment and publication.

How can staff and users keep track

of all this activity?

This is where PUMA comes in.

Initially created at the Institut

Laue-Langevin neutron source

neighbouring the ESRF, PUMA is an

experiment and publication metadata-

analyser. Since 2019 it has been honed

at the ESRF, to expose trends in the

light source’s voluminous output.

For any search query it can display

infographics about instruments and

beamlines techniques scientific

areas authors member countries

publications submitted and accepted

proposals and more besides all

in real time PUMA allows us to

probe the uniqueness of our science

programme said Michael Krisch

the ESRF ad interim director of

research for the life sciences chemistry

and soft matter in an ESRFhosted

event to mark the completion of

STREAMLINE

Operated here by

Manuel Muñoz from

the University of

Montpellier, a

robotic system that

can scan 160

samples per hour

on the BM23

beamline is one of

STREAMLINE’s

many legacies.

What is STREAMLINE?

SusTainable REseArch at Micro

and nano X-ray beamLINEs, or

STREAMLINE, began in late 2019

as a project to complement the second

phase of the ESRF’s upgrade. Funded

by the European Commission’s

Horizon 2020 programme to the

tune of €5m, it aimed to maximise

the potential for users – as swiftly as

possible – of the extreme brilliance and

coherence of the new X-ray beams.

How has this been done?

One of the changes has been in the

way users access the ESRF. Previously,

most individual scientists or research

groups had to apply directly to the

ESRF for beamtime on specific

projects for a single, six-month

scheduling period. With spiralling

data-acquisition speeds and proposal

numbers, that protocol was becoming

increasingly unworkable. Thanks

to STREAMLINE, the ESRF User

Office was able to develop new types

of “community proposal”, to improve

the efficiency of beamtime allocation

and allow more experiments. One

of the new types of proposal is the

block allocation groups, or BAGs,

in which communities of principal

investigators (PIs) working in the same

field and sharing the same beamline

requirements, apply to the ESRF

together for beamtime, and then share

it among themselves. Another has been

the HUB, in which PIs working on the

same scientific theme of major societal

importance not only coordinate

beamtime use but share their results,

for faster progress and more impact

see ESRFnews June 2023 p10 and

December 2023 p10 Meanwhile all

proposals have been made easier to

administer with NEXTUP a new user

portal interface

What about once users are at their

beamline

They might not even have to be there

in person thanks to modes of remote

access that were swiftly implemented

at the beginning of the COVID19

pandemic However wherever users

A major EU-funded project that supported the ESRF–EBS upgrade has concluded, leaving

a trail of benef its.

The streamlined approach

E S R F / C A R G O U D