High Performance Macromolecular Crystallography Beamline

Significant step towards development of malaria vaccine

WEHI and collaborators use synchrotron techniques to elucidate binding mechanism

Fine-tuning chemistry produces stability in bismuth oxide

Spectroscopy elucidates oxidation states and local structures

Triggers of tree mortality published in Nature

WSU researchers used IMBL to get insights into impact of dehydration

A super "receptor" that kills HIV infected cells

MX beamlines used by Monash researchers in collaboration with Pasteur Instutute

The high-performance macromolecular crystallography beamline (HMX) will meet the needs of the MX community studying membrane proteins, large protein and nucleic acid complexes, naturally-occurring crystals and other challenging samples that are too small or weakly diffracting to be tested on the existing MX beamlines. The most important targets for the design of novel drugs include difficult large assemblies such as membrane-bound complexes, proteasomes, RNA/DNA polymerases, ribosomes and ever larger and biologically more relevant protein-protein, protein-RNA and protein-DNA complexes. Such structures rarely produce crystals of sufficient size for analysis using traditional MX beamlines. A micro-focus beamline well beyond the capability of the existing MX beamlines is essential for studying increasingly common sub-5 μm crystals. Thus, the 5 × 5 μm² focus of this beamline delivering greater than 10¹² ph/s coupled with an ultra-high performance detector will provide a state-of-the-art facility for Australasian researchers, permitting high-impact science on these crystals to be carried out at the Australian Synchrotron.

Download HMX Detailed Report 2011-09 (pdf, 1,050kb)

Contact Charlie Bond
Position: Chair: AS MX / SMX Program Advisory Committee, University of Western Australia
Phone: +61 (0)8 6488 4406
Email: Charles.Bond@uwa.edu.au