Speaker
Description
The BL06-XAIRA beamline is the microfocus macromolecular crystallography (MX) instrument at the ALBA synchrotron, that just accomplished its first year of User Operation.
XAIRA currently delivers a highly stable, intense X-ray beam of 4 × 3 µm2 (FWHM at 1 Å wavelength) in the energy range of 4.0 to 14 keV, specifically tailored for demanding structural biology projects. This high-flux beam is paired with a state-of-the-art Dectris Eiger2 XE 9M photon-counting detector capable of acquiring data at frame rates up to 1 kHz. This configuration enables rapid data collection and supports time-resolved serial synchrotron crystallography (SSX) experiments within the millisecond regime.
Another differential trait of XAIRA is its specialized end-station chamber, in which the entire experimental setup —including the sample environment, detector, and cryostream— is enclosed within a controlled helium atmosphere. Operating in helium prevents flux attenuation at low energies and, more importantly, drastically reduces background noise from air scattering, improving the signal-to-noise ratio of diffraction images, at all beam energies. The chamber design, though, maintains full compatibility with standard MX sample formats and conventional operation in air.
Since welcoming its first official users in July 2025 and its transition into full operation, XAIRA has demonstrated its value for challenging structural biology projects. Here we present the learnings from this first year of operation, presenting case examples of successful results and describing how the beamline can be used to obtain the best data set for different types of challenging samples, and how the automated data processing software is used to provide immediate feedback and guide the data collection decision-making.
We will also present the foreseen upgrades to be implemented in the upcoming ALBA2 Beamlines Upgrade Plan, which will improve both the beamline optics system and the End Station capabilities.