In recent years, advances in high-throughput techniques for macromolecular crystallography have highlighted the importance pf structure-based drug design (SBDD), and demand for synchrotron use by pharmaceutical researchers has increased. In order to meet this demand, we have constructed a new high-throughput macromolecular crystallography beamline AR-NE3A, dedicated to SBDD, funded in partnership with Astellas Pharma Inc.

At AR-NE3A, the light source results from an in-vacuum undulator located in the Photon Factory Advanced Ring (PF-AR), with a beam energy of 6.5GeV ring, which provides a high flux X-ray beam. The optics consists of three main components, i.e. a collimating mirror, a double crystal monochromator combined with a liquid nitrogen cooling system, and a toroidal double-focusing mirror, respectively. As a consequence of these light source and optics settings, we could obtain a photon flux at the sample position up to three times higher when compared with the other existing high-throughput beamlines at the Photon Factory, AR-NW12A and BL-5A. In the experimental hutch, a high precision diffractometer, a fast-readout and high-gain CCD detector, and a sample exchange robot able to handle more than two hundred cryo-cooled samples stored in a Dewar, have been installed. To facilitate high-throughput data collection required for pharmaceutical researches, fully automated data collection and processing systems have been developed. With this framework, sample exchange, centering, data collection, and data processing are automatically carried out based on a user pre-defined schedule, enabling researchers to collect X-ray diffraction data sets from more than two hundreds samples.

Astellas Pharma Inc. has a priority access to AR-NE3A. The remaining beam time will be allocated to general academic users and other industrial users.

Figure 1 : Aerial view of KEK campus (Left), together with the map of PF-AR experimental hall (Top-Right). A new beamline has been constructed at the NE3 section, indicated in red. Another beamline, indicated in orange, is one of the existing macromolecular crystallography beamline, AR-NW12A.

Figure 2 : Experimental setup in the end station.