Stanford Auto-Mounter (SAM)

This video shows the Stanford Auto-Mounter (SAM) , which allows automated screening of crystals at the synchrotron. Individual crystals are mounted onto the beam line for screening using the SAM system. Three sample cassettes are held under liquid nitrogen in a dispensing dewar, which is located close to the goniometer, inside the experimental hutch. A commercial Epson ES553S 4-axis robot, outfitted with a pneumatically operated cryo-tong, removes samples from the cassette and places them on the goniometer. The SAM system also allows sorting of crystals from one cassette to another. Thus, the most promising crystals can be consolidated into a single cassette prior to data collection. The sorting facility is now in a prototype stage and will be developed into a full user system in the near future. SDC has fully integrated the SAM system with the existing macromolecular crystallography beam line environment by implementing a user-interface within the BLU-ICE data collection software. The system also communicates with the JCSG database via a "beam line report", which is an Excel spreadsheet describing the crystals in each shipment. Please see http://technology.lbl.gov/portal/Stanford+Auto-Mounter+(SAM) for more details and contact information.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Structural Biology
• Structural genomics
• JCSG
• crystal
• mount
• PSI
• SGKB technology portal