Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011 Mar;67(Pt 3):176-88.
doi: 10.1107/S0907444910053916. Epub 2011 Feb 15.

JBluIce-EPICS control system for macromolecular crystallography

Sergey Stepanov  1 , Oleg Makarov, Mark Hilgart, Sudhir Babu Pothineni, Alex Urakhchin, Satish Devarapalli, Derek Yoder, Michael Becker, Craig Ogata, Ruslan Sanishvili, Nagarajan Venugopalan, Janet L Smith, Robert F Fischetti
Affiliations

JBluIce-EPICS control system for macromolecular crystallography

Sergey Stepanov et al. Acta Crystallogr D Biol Crystallogr. 2011 Mar.

Abstract

The trio of macromolecular crystallography beamlines constructed by the General Medicine and Cancer Institutes Collaborative Access Team (GM/CA-CAT) in Sector 23 of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) have been in growing demand owing to their outstanding beam quality and capacity to measure data from crystals of only a few micrometres in size. To take full advantage of the state-of-the-art mechanical and optical design of these beamlines, a significant effort has been devoted to designing fast, convenient, intuitive and robust beamline controls that could easily accommodate new beamline developments. The GM/CA-CAT beamline controls are based on the power of EPICS for distributed hardware control, the rich Java graphical user interface of Eclipse RCP and the task-oriented philosophy as well as the look and feel of the successful SSRL BluIce graphical user interface for crystallography. These beamline controls feature a minimum number of software layers, the wide use of plug-ins that can be written in any language and unified motion controls that allow on-the-fly scanning and optimization of any beamline component. This paper describes the ways in which BluIce was combined with EPICS and converted into the Java-based JBluIce, discusses the solutions aimed at streamlining and speeding up operations and gives an overview of the tools that are provided by this new open-source control system for facilitating crystallographic experiments, especially in the field of microcrystallography.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
EPICS architecture.
Figure 2
Figure 2
SSRL BluIce architecture.
Figure 3
Figure 3
BluIce–EPICS architecture. The streamlined BluIce–EPICS applications are standard EPICS clients and are equal-rights players on the EPICS channel-access network. They can coexist with other EPICS clients as shown on the left.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Interaction of BluIce clients (two instances shown in the center) with external helpers.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Schematic implementation of on-the-fly scanning with PMAC controller and Struck scaler.
Figure 6
Figure 6
JBluIce Hutch tab.
Figure 7
Figure 7
JBluIce Sample tab.
Figure 8
Figure 8
JBluIce Collect tab with controls for data collection along a vector.
Figure 9
Figure 9
JBluIce Scan tab with controls for automatic scanning.
Figure 10
Figure 10
JBluIce Raster tab in the diffraction rastering mode.
Figure 11
Figure 11
JBluIce Screening tab.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Abola, E., Kuhn, P., Earnest, T. & Stevens, R. C. (2000). Nature Struct. Biol. 7, 973–977. - PubMed
    1. Aishima, J., Owen, R. L., Axford, D., Shepherd, E., Winter, G., Levik, K., Gibbons, P., Ashton, A. & Evans, G. (2010). Acta Cryst. D66, 1032–1035. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Alcock, S. G., Ludbrook, G. D. & Sawhney, K. J. S. (2010). Synchrotron Radiat. News, 23, 25–30.
    1. Bowler, M. W., Guijarro, M., Petitdemange, S., Baker, I., Svensson, O., Burghammer, M., Mueller-Dieckmann, C., Gordon, E. J., Flot, D., McSweeney, S. M. & Leonard, G. A. (2010). Acta Cryst. D66, 855–864. - PubMed
    1. Brennan, S. & Cowan, P. L. (1992). Rev. Sci. Instrum. 63, 850–853.

Publication types

MeSH terms