• Journal of Photoscience
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.463-465
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• 2002

RIKEN Structural Genomics Beamlines have been constructed for the crystallographic analysis in the structural genomics research at synchrotron radiation facility SPring-8. Synchrotron radiation accelerates the crystallographic analysis of protein structure. The target of the research and development is focused on the automatic beamline operation to maximize beamline efficiency. We are developing the sample management system, which is composed of the sample auto-changer and the database system, for high-throughput data collection. The sample management system and the beamline operating system make it possible to execute automatic data collection without any operators. The beamlines will be ready for user operation in autumn 2002. The concept of automatic beamline operation and the present status of RIKEN Structural Genomics Beamlines will be presented.

• Macromolecular Research
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.140-145
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• 2006

E-science refers to the large-scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. The Grid is a service-oriented architecture proposed to provide access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and remote facilities. Web services, which are server applications, enable online access to service providers. Web portal interfaces can further hide the complexity of accessing facility's services. The main use of synchrotron radiation (SR) facilities by protein crystallographers is to collect the best possible diffraction data for reasonably well defined problems. Significant effort is therefore being made throughout the world to automate SR protein crystallography facilities so scientists can achieve high throughput, even if they are not expert in all the techniques. By applying the above technologies, the e-HTPX project, a distributed computing infrastructure, was designed to help scientists remotely plan, initiate and monitor experiments for protein crystallographic structure determination. A description of both the hardware and control software is given together in this paper.