BioCAT Town Hall Wrap-Up

Date

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the BioCAT Town hall on January 10th!

We announced a lot of exciting new/upgraded capabilities. Some of that you can now find on our website, while others we’ll be updating shortly.

Perhaps the most important announcement is that BioCAT is resuming user operations this spring, with user beamtime available starting February 13th.

One announcement we don’t want to slip through the cracks is that Dr. Jesse Hopkins has taken over as BioCAT Director, while Dr. Tom Irving remains on as BioCAT PI.

For the beamline in general we announced:

  1. 8x reduction in main horizontal beam size and 16x reduction in microfocus horizontal beamsize with APS-U.
  2. A $2 million supplement from the NIH to upgrade our optics to take full advantage of the new APS-U source.

For solution SAXS, we announced:

  1. A new customized HPLC system for SEC-SAXS and SEC-MALS-SAXS capable of simultaneously running a sample and equilibrating a column, with flow paths switchable at the press of a button, control software incorporated into BioCAT’s BioCon software, and temperature control from 4-40 C.
  2. A new asymmetric flow field-flow fractionation (AF4) instrument coupled to MALS and SAXS (AF4-MALS-SAXS). This is a method for separating macromolcules by size without a matrix, and is particularly useful for lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) and other similar systems that are challenging to purify with size exclusion columns.
  3. A new batch mode autosampler for SAXS that uses just 10 µL of sample and can run a sample every ~3 minutes.
  4. A new self-scheduling tool for equilibrium SAXS experiments.

For fiber and muscle diffraction we announced:

  1. A new offline lab for preparation and characterization of muscle samples.
  2. The availability of a new SomnoSuite isoflurane anesthetic machine to greatly reduce animal usage for intact skeletal muscle projects.
  3. The ability to obtain well resolved fiber diffraction peaks in the horizontal direction due to the smaller beam size from APS-U. This means fiber samples can be mounted in any orientation without loss of resolution, and improves the ability to resolve closely spaced peaks in the horizontal direction.
  4. A new in-air shooting setup for muscle experiments that increases measured signal by 3-4x a measurement in solution.

We also discussed updated administrative procedures for getting beamtime. Some key points:

  1. The APS has a new proposal system, called the Universal Proposal System (UPS). BioCAT users should put in either Standard General User Proposals (GUPs), which are good for 2 years and are the preferred proposal style at BioCAT, or Rapid Access GUPs, which are good for 1 run. For the upcoming spring run only Rapid Access proposals can be accepted, due to the proposal deadlines.
  2. New for users with the APS-U, on-site users must request a dosimeter at least 3 business days in advance of their experiment in order to carry out their experiments.

Videos and slides from the town hall are now available here: