Upgrade of bending magnet MX beamline BL38B1 at SPring-8

The bending magnet beamline BL38B1 at SPring-8 is equipped with X-ray optics consisting of the SPring-8 standard double crystal monochromator (DCM) with Si (111) and a vertically bent cylindrical mirror, which produce available energy ranging from 6 to 17 keV and photon flux of 8.6 × 10¹⁰ Ph/sec at 12.4 keV. These moderate beam properties are suited to high throughput cryogenic macromolecular crystallography (MX) using moderately sized crystals (over 100 µm) and non-cryo-cooled MX methodology that takes advantage of the lower X-ray dose rate. However, along with the recent research trends the target crystal sizes have tended to become smaller and smaller, and are currently less than 100 µm. To resolve this issue, we achieved an upgrade of beamline optics for higher flux and higher density X-rays and development of apparatuses for precise diffraction data collection.