Swiss Norwegian Beamline Purchase New Large Area CCD Detector for Six-Circle Synchrotron Diffractometer from Oxford Diffraction Limited

SNBL based at the ESRF synchrotron purchase the "ONYX" large-area CCD to mount on their six-circle diffractometer. The detector will be used for a variety of applications in single-crystal diffraction including protein crystallography.

The Swiss Norwegian Beamline (SNBL) based at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) have today agreed to purchase the brand new "ONYX" large-area charge-coupled device (CCD) detector from Oxford Diffraction Limited to mount on their existing six-circle synchrotron diffractometer. The SNBL team will use the ONYX detector for a variety of applications in single-crystal diffraction including protein crystallography.

The patent-protected ONYX detector has been developed, and is manufactured and distributed, by Oxford Diffraction Limited, an innovative X-ray diffraction company, based in Oxfordshire, UK, with a site in Wroclaw, Poland, and offices in Cologne, Germany, and Concord, MA, USA.

Oxford Diffraction's new ONYX detector comprises a 165 mm diameter area with a pixel size of 60 microns and provides the best signal/noise readout coupled with the fastest readout times of any commercially available large area CCD detector in the field of crystallography. Its primary application will be for macromolecular and protein crystallography when mounted on Oxford Diffraction's recently launched Xcalibur-PX system for the home laboratory. In this case it will be integrated into the SNBL's existing six-circle diffractometer which was supplied by Kuma Diffraction, one of the founding companies of Oxford Diffraction Limited. Dr. Paul Loeffen, Managing Director of Oxford Diffraction Limited said "I am delighted with this opportunity to extend our collaboration with the SNBL - the integration of the ONYX detector will create a unique, world-beating instrument that is ideal for a wide range of sophisticated studies in the field of single crystal diffraction".

The integration of the ONYX detector at the SNBL will take place in early 2003 - Professor Hans-Peter Weber, Project Director of the SNBL said "with this long-awaited acquisition, the Swiss-Norwegian Beamlines at ESRF equip an already exceptional single-crystal diffractometer with the latest detector technology. The increased speed of data collection will permit users to tackle problems which in the past were only talked about in visionary documents. For the SNBL this is a rather exciting period; one of our workhorse instruments is finally being equipped with all the essential components (ONYX area detector, Helijet very low temperature cryo-blower, etc.), for which it was initially conceived".

The SNBL has a wide and diverse user community and the instrument will be used for studies ranging from smallish molecules to macro- and other molecules such as those used as building blocks in crystal engineering. Dr. Gerard Bricogne of Global Phasing Limited, based in Cambridge, UK, said "I really look forward to seeing this uniquely versatile instrument in action. It will give us access to a new range of strategies for collecting diffraction data on macromolecules with very low levels of systematic error. These strategies require a high degree of goniometric flexibility, which is unavailable on ordinary instruments. We are hoping in particular to be able to start exploiting the anisotropy of anomalous scattering to confer extra phasing power to the single-wavelength anomalous diffraction (SAD) method, a goal which my group with Dr. Marc Schiltz have been pursuing for some time at SNBL. The new ONYX detector will move this project into an exciting new era."