SIBYLS — a SAXS and Protein Crystallography Beamline at the ALS

The new Structurally Integrated BiologY for Life Sciences (SIBYLS) beamline at the Advanced Light Source will be dedicated to Macromolecular Crystallography (PX) and Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS). SAXS will provide structural information of macromolecules in solutions and will complement high resolution PX studies on the same systems but in a crystalline state. The x-ray source is one of the 5 Testa superbend dipoles recently installed at the ALS that allows for a hard x-ray program to be developed on the relatively low energy Advanced Light Source (ALS) ring (1.9 GeV). The beamline is equipped with fast interchangeable monochromator elements, consisting of either a pair of single Si(111) crystals for crystallography, or a pair of multilayers for the SAXS mode data collection (E/DeltaEsimilar to1/110). Flux rates with Si(111) crystals for PX are measured as 2x10(11) hv/sec through a 100mum pinhole at 12.4KeV. For SAXS the flux is up to 3x10(13) photons/sec at 10KeV with all apertures open when using the multilayer monochromator elements. The performance characteristics of this unique beamline will be described.