The Protein Micro-crystallography Beamline (BL18U1) at Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility

摘要: The BL18U1 microcrystallographic beamline at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) is one of the five beamlines operated by the National Protein Science Facility in Shanghai (NFPSS), and is also the first microcrystallographic beamline in the third-generation synchrotron facility in China. The beamline uses an U25 undulator as a light source, offering a tunable energy range from 5 to 18 keV. BL18U1 is specifically designed for the collection of diffraction data from protein crystals as small as 10 µm in size, with the X-ray beam focused below 10×10 µm^2 while maintaining a high photon flux. The experiment station is equipped with a high-precision MD2 diffractometer, a Pilatus 3 6M detector, and a Rigaku ACTOR robotic sample changer. Since being opened to users in March 2015, BL18U1 has demonstrated strong performance and reliability. At the end of 2024, users have published more than 900 peer-reviewed research articles and deposited more than 1,600 macromolecular structures in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The beamline’s data quality and throughput have earned widespread recognition from the user community, with both the number of deposited structures and publications steadily increasing year by year.