Present status of SPring-8 macromolecular crystallography beamlines

Seven beamlines are operated for macromolecular crystallography (MX) at SPring‐8. The three undulator beamlines are developed for cutting edge target and four bending‐magnet beamlines are developed for high throughput MX. The undulator beamline, BL41XU that provides the most brilliant beam, is dedicated to obtain high quality data even from small‐size and weakly‐diffracting crystals. The minimum beam size at sample position is achieved to 10 μm diameter using a pin‐hole collimator. Its photon flux at wavelength λ = 1.0 A is 2.8×1011 photons/sec. This small beam coupled with irradiation point scanning method is quite useful to take diffraction dataset from small crystals by suppressing the radiation damage. These advanced technologies made a number of difficult protein structure analysis possible, (i.e. Sodium‐potassium ATPase). The bending‐magnet beamlines BL26B1/B2 and BL38B1 provide automatic data collection exploiting the high mobility of the beam. The beamline operation software “BSS,” sample auto‐cha...