Fast automated energy changes at synchrotron radiation beamlines equipped with transfocator or focusing mirrors.

Algorithms and procedures to fully automate retuning of synchrotron radiation beamlines over wide energy ranges are discussed. The discussion is based on the implementation at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Cancer Institute Structural Biology Facility at the Advanced Photon Source. When a user selects a new beamline energy, software synchronously controls the beamline monochromator and undulator to maintain the X-ray beam flux after the monochromator, preserves beam attenuation by determining a new set of attenuator foils, changes, as needed, mirror reflecting stripes and the undulator harmonic, preserves beam focal distance of compound refractive lens focusing by changing the In/Out combination of lenses in the transfocator, and, finally, restores beam position at the sample by on-the-fly scanning of either the Kirkpatrick-Baez mirror angles or the transfocator up/down and inboard/outboard positions.

High-viscosity injector-based pink-beam serial crystallography of microcrystals at a synchrotron radiation source.

Since the first successful serial crystallography (SX) experiment at a synchrotron radiation source, the popularity of this approach has continued to grow showing that third-generation synchrotrons can be viable alternatives to scarce X-ray free-electron laser sources. Synchrotron radiation flux may be increased ∼100 times by a moderate increase in the bandwidth ('pink beam' conditions) at some cost to data analysis complexity. Here, we report the first high-viscosity injector-based pink-beam SX experiments.

Solving protein structure from sparse serial microcrystal diffraction data at a storage-ring synchrotron source.

In recent years, the success of serial femtosecond crystallography and the paucity of beamtime at X-ray free-electron lasers have motivated the development of serial microcrystallography experiments at storage-ring synchrotron sources. However, especially at storage-ring sources, if a crystal is too small it will have suffered significant radiation damage before diffracting a sufficient number of X-rays into Bragg peaks for peak-indexing software to determine the crystal orientation. As a consequence, the data frames of small crystals often cannot be indexed and are discarded.

Antimicrobial activity of four essential oils against pigmenting and biofilmproducing of dairy origin.

Essential oils (EOs) are mixtures of secondary metabolites of plant origin with many useful properties, among which the antimicrobial activity is also of interest for the food industry. EOs can exert their antimicrobial potential both directly, in food products and active packaging, and indirectly, as sanitizing and anti-biofilm agents of food facility surfaces. Aim of this research was to evaluate the antimicrobial activity of four EOs (bergamot, cinnamon, manuka and thyme) against and isolated from milk and dairy products.

Pink-beam serial crystallography.

Serial X-ray crystallography allows macromolecular structure determination at both X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) and, more recently, synchrotron sources. The time resolution for serial synchrotron crystallography experiments has been limited to millisecond timescales with monochromatic beams. The polychromatic, "pink", beam provides a more than two orders of magnitude increased photon flux and hence allows accessing much shorter timescales in diffraction experiments at synchrotron sources.