PROXIMA-2A

Welcome to PROXIMA-2A! 
A leading light for biology, chemistry and micro-crystallography.

PROXIMA 2A (PX2-A) is a microfocus beamline dedicated to biological crystallography and innovative micro-beam methodologies. Opened to the scientific community since 2013, the topics treated on the beamline go beyond standard protein crystallography and include drug discovery, membrane proteins, virus crystallography, small molecule crystallography, powder diffraction and even crystalluria.   The beamline is highly automated and designed to help scientists tackle the most challenging structural targets and biological systems. The X-ray energy is rapidly tunable over a wide range (6-18 keV) making the most commonly used absorption edges accessible for anomalous diffraction experiments.  The end station is equipped with a high capacity sample-changing system (144 SPINE pins), a high performance micro-diffractometer with a mini-kappa (MD2), an X-ray fluorescence detector (KETEK), and a fast, low-noise, photon-counting, area detector - the EIGER X 9M (238 fps in 9M mode, 750 fps in 4M mode).

See also Biology Health : HelioBio

SHEPARD William
Beamline Manager
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01 69 35 96 36
SAVKO Martin
Beamline Scientist
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01 69 35 81 76
SIRIGU Serena
Beamline Scientist
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01 69 35 97 78
RIZK Mahmoud
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01 69 35 97 32

* External service provider, temporary or collaborator

Job Opportunities

Please contact William SHEPARD for more information.

Below are the publications that should be cited when acknowledging PROXIMA 2A:

  • The general PROXIMA 2A beamline publication is in the SRI 2013 Proceedings.
    • Duran et al. (2013) "PROXIMA 2A – A New Fully Tunable Micro-focus Beamline for Macromolecular Crystallography" Journal of Physics: Conference Series 425, 012005. doi:10.1088/1742-6596/425/1/012005.
  • Martin Savko's oral presentation on using EIGER detectors at the ECM 30 (Basel, Switzerland).
  • Studies on using Helical Scans to mitigate X-ray radiation damage is published in a special issue of the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation.
    • Polsinelli et al. (2017) "Comparison of helical scan and standard rotation methods in single-crystal X-ray data collection strategies." J. Synchrotron Rad. 24, 42–52. doi:10.1107/S1600577516018488.
  • Adam Simpkin's SIMBAD pipeline is described in the Act Cryst D publication below.
    • Simpkin et al. (2018) "SIMBAD: a sequence-independent molecular-replacement pipeline." Acta Crystallogr D Struct Biol. 74, 595–605. doi: 10.1107/S2059798318005752.
  • The Cribleur plate screener is described in the MEDSI 2018 Proceedings.
    • Jeangerard et al (2018) "FROM PLATE SCREENING TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: INNOVATIVE DEVELOPMENTS ON PROXIMA 2A AT SYNCHROTRON SOLEIL." JACoW Publishing, MEDSI 2018 Proceedings WEPH36. doi:10.18429/JACoW-MEDSI2018-WEPH36.
  • Studies on fast data collections with the Eiger X 1M for the ELI beamlines (Prague, Czech Republic).
  • Developing Synchrotron Serial Crystallography methods for MOFs, POMs and small unit cell.    
    • de Zitter et al. (2024)  "Elucidating metal–organic framework structures using synchrotron serial crystallography." CrystEngComm, advance publication. doi: 10.1039/d4ce00735b.