We have applied some changes to ARIA and are monitoring stability, but you can continue to work as normal. We appreciate your understanding.
ALBA, the Spanish synchrotron facility, is fully committed to serve the worldwide scientific and industrial communities with state-of-the-art instrumentation and services to address the challenges of our time, most notably in Life Sciences. ALBA is currently operating 11 beamlines, with three more under design or construction phase. Since the start of user operation in 2012, ALBA has catered 8,500 researchers, half of them from European and international institutes. Three beamlines, MISTRAL, XALOC and XAIRA, are of special relevance for the activities of the Instruct-ERIC initiative.
MISTRAL beamline is dedicated to cryo soft X-ray tomography (cryo-SXT), a new imaging and spectroscopy technique that fills the spatial resolution gap between visible light microscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). MISTRAL is able to resolve the 3D structure of whole vitrified cells at near native conditions and ~25 nm resolution half pitch. In addition, cryo-spectromicroscopy can be performed to locate intracellularly some oligo elements, heavy atoms from uptaken nanoparticles or compounds. Scientific cases of MISTRAL include health (pathogenic infections, cancer and diseases), biomineralization, nanoparticles internalization, drug delivery or characterization of particular organelles or structures inside the cell.
MISTRAL beamline is dedicated to cryo soft X-ray tomography (cryo-SXT), a new imaging and spectroscopy technique that fills the spatial resolution gap between visible light microscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). MISTRAL is able to resolve the 3D structure of whole vitrified cells at near native conditions and ~25 nm resolution half pitch. In addition, cryo-spectromicroscopy can be performed to locate intracellularly some oligo elements, heavy atoms from uptaken nanoparticles or compounds. Scientific cases of MISTRAL include health (pathogenic infections, cancer and diseases), biomineralization, nanoparticles internalization, drug delivery or characterization of particular organelles or structures inside the cell.
The need to image the detailed relationship between structure and function, at various levels of resolution and length scales, has pushed towards the development of correlative imaging studies involving 3D microscopic techniques. In this scenario, soft X-rays in the so-called water window energy range (284-543 eV) are a versatile probe to study entire biological samples of up to 10 µm thickness due to their different interaction between biological structures and the surrounding water. Importantly, cryo-SXT is a non- destructive technique, so the information obtained using MISTRAL can be combined with data from TEM, cryo-FIB-SEM, nano X-ray fluorescence or infrared (FTIR) spectro-microscopy. Also remarkable, the chemical characterization (achieved by selecting a X-ray energy just above an absorption edge characteristic of an specific element) can be correlated with the morphological information delivered by cryo-tomography on the same sample.
Cryo-SXT is currently not available within the portfolio of Instruct-ERIC instruments, in spite of its interest for integrative structural biology at subcellular level. Actually, there are only five cryo-SXT beamlines in the world, three of them operating in Europe.
The service of the beamline includes a cryo 3D structured illumination microscope providing images at 100 nm resolution half pitch to allow correlative visible light and X-ray studies (CLXM). This microscope will also be made available for visiting groups accessing through Instruct. The services include a Glow discharge for grid preparation, the vitrification system Leica EM GP and the transfer system from grid to beamline in cryo conditions.
