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S C I E N T I F I C H I G H L I G H T S

S T R U C T U R A L B I O L O G Y

2021 saw a significant highlight for both the Structural Biology group and for the ESRF in general. Specifically, August 25 saw the first anniversary of the restart of ESRF user operations following the ESRF-EBS upgrade and, by this time, all of the group s end-stations as well as the ancillary facilities (the spectroscopy lab (icOS) the high-pressure lab (HPMX) and the molecular biology lab (CIBB)) were up and running in full swing. That this was the case is due to staff not only from the ESRF, but also from the EMBL Grenoble (which jointly operates the ESRF s MX and the BioSAXS beamlines through the Joint Structural Biology Group (JSBG)), the French Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS) and the ILL. Without their dedication, the beamlines and ancillary facilities would not be running as smoothly as they do. Many thanks for all your efforts!

Another highlight of the year was the demanding but very successful review of the last five years of structural biology activities. Even though it was carried out remotely, the review triggered very useful and fruitful discussions on future directions of structural biology at the ESRF.

However, in 2021 the most prominent challenge, both for the ESRF and worldwide, remained the continuing sanitary crisis provoked by SARS-CoV-2. A direct consequence of this was that the vast majority of experiments carried out on our beamlines and facilities were performed either as mail-in experiments (e.g., those on BM29, CM01, icOS and the HPMX lab) with local staff performing the experiments, as entirely remote access experiments (on the MX end-stations ID23-1, ID23-2, ID30A-3, ID30B) with users controlling beamlines from their home laboratories, or as completely automatic experiments (as on ID30A-1). The high degree of automation implemented on all the beamlines over a decade or so helped both our users and ourselves cope with these challenges. 2021 also saw the construction of the new ID29/EBSL8 beamline move closer to completion. The beamline will produce an unprecedented photon flux density for a structural biology beamline in a beam size below 1 µm in diameter and is due to reach its commissioning phase in the spring of 2022. ID29/EBSL8 will welcome peer-reviewed user access for experiments in (time-resolved) synchrotron serial crystallography ((TR-)SSX) from August 2022.

Nearly all of the structural biology group s end-stations and facilities were incrementally upgraded during 2021 and this has allowed us to considerably improve the performance of some of our end-stations and facilities. Much effort has been made in software developments such as MXCuBE, BSXCuBE, ISPyB/EXI as well as data processing pipelines for diffraction, solution scattering and cryo-EM data. CM01, our Titan Krios cryo-electron microscope, saw the exchange of the previously installed K2 camera for a latest-