Development of an Auto Sample Centering Algorithm at the Macromolecular Crystallography Beam Line of the Pohang Light Source

An automatic sample centering system is underway at the protein crystallography beam line of the Pohang Light Source to improve the efficiency of the crystal screening process. A sample pin which contains a protein crystal is mounted on a goniometer head. Then the crystal should be moved to the center of X-ray beam by controlling the motorized goniometer to obtain diffraction data. Since the X-ray beam is located at the center of the image obtained from the CCD camera when the image of the sample pin is in focus, an auto-focusing algorithm is a very important part in the auto-sample-centering system. However the results of applying several well-known auto focusing algorithms directly to the images are not satisfactory owing to the following factors: misalignment of CCD camera, non-uniform cryo-stream in the background of the image and the supporter of the loop. The performance of an auto-focusing algorithm can be increased if the algorithm is applied to only the loop region identified. Non-uniform cryo-stream and a various illumination condition and a stain, which is shown in the image, are main obstacles to loop region identification. In this paper, a simple loop region identification algorithm, which can solve these problems, is proposed and the effective ness of the proposed scheme is shown by applying the auto-focusing algorithm to the loop region identified.

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