In order to meet increasing demands from both NIH intramural and extramural communities for access to a small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) resource, the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) under the leadership of Drs. Jeffrey Strathern and Bob Wiltrout established a partnership user program (PUP) with the Argonne National Laboratory Photon Source in October 2008.
This PUP agreement secures a certain percentage of the Argonne synchrotron beam time for biomedical research.
In 2013, CCR established the CCR SAXS facility with Dr. Yun-Xing Wang as the facility head and Dr. Xianyang Fang as its first full-time staff member to better serve these communities.
In 2014, Dr. Lixin Fan was recruited to succeed Dr. Fang, who took a faculty position at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The SAXS Facility includes an in-house state-of-the-art SAXS instrument (BioSAXS-2000) and routine access to beamtime from the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab through the PUP agreement. The SAXS Facility is open to all NIH intramural and extramural research communities, and serving CCR researchers is our top priority.
The mission of the SAXS Facility is to provide support to research projects from CCR principal investigators (PIs), NIH intramural PIs, and extramural academic research groups/laboratories. The support includes providing routine access to the APS PUP SAXS/WAXS beamline and in-house SAXS instrument, as well as expertise in experimental design, data collection, processing, analysis, and interpretation. Our main focus is to determine the structure of biomacromolecules and their complexes in solution. The research field includes, but is not limited to, structural studies of nucleic acids, proteins, protein assemblies, virus particles, lipid membranes, protein/DNA, and protein/RNA complexes.
The SAXS facility is a CCR collaborative resource dedicated to the CCR researchers. But we also make this resource accessible to non-CCR users free of charge. There are three ways to make use of the SAXS facility resource:
Like any institution, the SAXS facility is subject to annual reviews based on its performance and impact on the community in terms of a number of criteria. Thus, the success of the SAXS facility highly depends on the strong support of the user community. Whenever the staff makes intellectual contributions to your research projects, such as collecting data, and/or processing data, authorship for whoever contributes is appropriate. In all cases, the use of the beamline and the people who inevitably help with data collection at the beamline resource should be acknowledged.
An example of acknowledgment
For the SAXS experiments, we gratefully acknowledge the use of the SAXS facility of the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute (NCI). The SAXS data were collected at beamline 12-ID-B. The shared scattering beamline 12-ID-B resource is allocated under the PUP-24152 agreement between the National Cancer Institute and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). We thank Dr. Lixin Fan (NCI), and Dr. Xiaobing Zuo (ANL) for their expert support. Use of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility, was operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
You should first become a CCR SAXS facility user to be eligible for a beamtime request. Please refer to "Becoming a Facility User". Your Principal Investigators or Supervisors must contact the facility staff and authorize the use of the CCR SAXS facility resource.
You will receive a synchrotron beamtime notice through emails. Fill out the sample information form and send it to Dr. Lixin Fan (Lixin.fan@nih.gov) at least 10 days before a beam time. Please notify if you plan to come to the APS beamline or come to the beamline to collect data by yourselves. Dr. Fan will collect the sample information from all the users and fill out the ESAF form and submit it to APS. In the sample information form, you must disclose the hazardous status of your samples such as biohazardous, chemical hazards, radioactive, etc. You can download the sample information form at User Support. Please notify Dr. Fan as soon as possible if there is a cancellation of your experiment.
To request a beam time of the in-house SAXS Instrument, please check the online Instrument Schedule and follow the instructions posted there. Your name and beam time allocations will be put on the schedule by SAXS facility staff. If a preliminary discussion of the scientific problem or training is required, contact Dr. Lixin Fan by e-mail or by phone/voice mail at 301-846-1362 (Bldg. 538/124). Please notify the SAXS facility personnel as soon as possible if you need to cancel or postpone a previously arranged appointment.
The allocation of SAXS facility beamtime will be prioritized based on a number of factors. The projects initiated by the CCR PIs take the highest priority, then intramural NIH researchers and extramural researchers from other organizations. Within the same priority group, beamtime is allocated mainly based on the order in which it is requested. In the meantime, beamtime is also allocated and users are grouped to make the most efficient use of the instrument based on required beamline settings. The SAXS facility staff reserves the right to allocate time at their discretion in order to balance the needs of users and the availability of the beamtime.
All researchers must complete lab safety training before using any SAXS instruments. The safety training for working at APS beamline will be provided by APS beamline scientists. The safety training for working at the In-house SAXS beamline/instrument will be provided by Dr. Lixin Fan.
The use of the BioSAXS-2000 instrument requires training by Dr. Lixin Fan. Previous training on a similar instrument is not necessarily adequate. The training will include data collection and data processing either on a synchrotron SAXS beamline or on the In-house SAXS beamline/instrument. All users that have a lapse of 3 months or more in their usage of the instrument MUST FIRST e-mail (Lixin.fan@nih.gov) to schedule refreshment training to reinforce their operation skills. The facility staff will be the only authorized personnel to train users.
The regular working hours for In-house BioSAXS are Monday-Friday 9:00 am-5:30 pm. After-hours access is available with the permission of SAXS facility staff.