20

INDUSTRY

March 2024 ESRFnews

T he ESRF has reached over the border to accommodate industrial clients

of the Swiss Light Source during its shutdown.

Following the upgrade of the ESRF

to a fourth-generation synchrotron

light source, a host of other facilities

are upgrading their X-ray storage rings.

One of these is the Swiss Light Source

(SLS) at the Paul Scherrer Institute

(PSI) in Villigen, Switzerland. Until

2025, when the SLS 2.0 comes online,

the ESRF will be assisting the light

source by providing a temporary home

for its industrial clients.

Since about four-fifths of these

clients are users of macromolecular

crystallography (MX) at the SLS

proprietary beamline PXII, scientists

at the ESRF ID23-1 structural

biology beamline have been busy

over the past year making it more

compatible with SLS working

protocols. This includes being

more flexible with how samples are

processed, setting up new workflows

and software routines, and applying

a planned increase in throughput.

“In doing this, we’ve been able to

support another synchrotron source

at an activity level of more than one

additional beamline per year,” says

Romain Talon, the ESRF industrial

liaison for structural biology. “In

terms of capacity, it’s like we’ve built

an extra beamline.”

Meeting expectations

The SLS has several long-term

industrial “partners” as part of its user

programme. A PSI spin-off company,

Expose, which mediates access for some

of these partners, and has clients of its

own has been working with ID231 to

help the ESRF beamline accommodate

the new workload Since we started so

early we were able to give feedback and

also to express our wishes for beamline

features says Joachim Diez the Expose

CEO It was absolutely crucial for us

that the ESRF was willing to cover all

of our beamtime needs I cannot think

of any other synchrotron that could

have done it especially thanks to

the work of the ESRF structural biology

group in that quality Its been

a very smooth transition

SLS beamline partners have now

been collecting data at ID231 for

six months Katherine McAuley the

PSI industrial liaison for structural

biology believes it was essential

for the SLS MX partners to have

guaranteed beamtime at a high

throughput facility The ESRF

industry team provided detailed

documentation and training

A helping hand

E S R F/ S T E F C A N D É

beforehand to make the transition

as seamless as possible she says

Now theyre taking good care of

our partners and were pleased that

our partners research programmes

can continue at the ESRF until we

welcome them back to the

SLS 20 in 2025



Jon Cartwright

ESRF industrial liaison engineers Estelle Moussou left and Romain Talon right at work on the ID231 structural

biology beamline

I cannot

think of

any other

synchrotron

that could

have done it