MHz beam sweeping serial crystallography for high-throughput pharmaceutical screening

Serial X-ray crystallography (SX) at synchrotrons allows structure determinations at nearly physiological temperatures and with time resolution down to the nanosecond range to observe binding of chemical compounds and the course of chemical reactions at atomic resolution in 3D. A current limitation of SX for high-throughput applications are the long data collection times and the large amounts of sample required for such projects. Within this proposal we aim at developing the new method of beam sweeping SX, where the X-ray is scanned over the semi-stationary sample with the use of rotating X-ray mirrors. The proposed beam-sweeping SX approach will allow MHz data collection with a complete dataset to be collected in seconds, enabling rapid structure determination. This will open new opportunities for drug discovery and pharmaceutical compound screening experiments, where much larger compound libraries can be studied at room temperature with less sample consumption than required today