June 2024 ESRFnews
10
INSIGHT
Has STREAMLINE also benefitted
industry?
Yes, hugely. According to Ennio
Capria, the ESRF’s deputy head
of business development, there is
a move towards following proof-
of-concept experiments with high-
throughput operando studies, which
will give industry scientists sufficient
knowledge to create “digital twins”
of their prototype systems. And
thanks to STREAMLINE funding,
this is already happening. At the
BM23 beamline, a robotic system
co-developed with the University of
Montpellier in France can scan 160
samples per hour. Another system,
co-developed with the chemical
company BASF at the ID31 beamline,
has scanned 9000 samples in six
months, and has won the favour of
six unique clients including a new
startup
Whats next
Technically the EU project concluded
in May this year but its legacy will be
felt for years to come as part of a wider
evolution away from techniquedriven
to problemdriven science Thanks a
lot to everyone who has contributed
said Krisch But its not over There is
life beyond STREAMLINE
Jon Cartwright
are, they can benefit from a new,
meta-workflow system, Ewoks, which
allows for highly tailored, automated
workflows, with data processing that
is more reproducible and concordant
with FAIR (traceable) principles.
Together with ICAT, a new open-
source metadata management system,
Ewoks aims to shorten the time between
experiment and publication.
How can staff and users keep track
of all this activity?
This is where PUMA comes in.
Initially created at the Institut
Laue-Langevin neutron source
neighbouring the ESRF, PUMA is an
experiment and publication metadata-
analyser. Since 2019 it has been honed
at the ESRF, to expose trends in the
light source’s voluminous output.
For any search query it can display
infographics about instruments and
beamlines techniques scientific
areas authors member countries
publications submitted and accepted
proposals and more besides all
in real time PUMA allows us to
probe the uniqueness of our science
programme said Michael Krisch
the ESRF ad interim director of
research for the life sciences chemistry
and soft matter in an ESRFhosted
event to mark the completion of
STREAMLINE
Operated here by
Manuel Muñoz from
the University of
Montpellier, a
robotic system that
can scan 160
samples per hour
on the BM23
beamline is one of
STREAMLINE’s
many legacies.
What is STREAMLINE?
SusTainable REseArch at Micro
and nano X-ray beamLINEs, or
STREAMLINE, began in late 2019
as a project to complement the second
phase of the ESRF’s upgrade. Funded
by the European Commission’s
Horizon 2020 programme to the
tune of €5m, it aimed to maximise
the potential for users – as swiftly as
possible – of the extreme brilliance and
coherence of the new X-ray beams.
How has this been done?
One of the changes has been in the
way users access the ESRF. Previously,
most individual scientists or research
groups had to apply directly to the
ESRF for beamtime on specific
projects for a single, six-month
scheduling period. With spiralling
data-acquisition speeds and proposal
numbers, that protocol was becoming
increasingly unworkable. Thanks
to STREAMLINE, the ESRF User
Office was able to develop new types
of “community proposal”, to improve
the efficiency of beamtime allocation
and allow more experiments. One
of the new types of proposal is the
block allocation groups, or BAGs,
in which communities of principal
investigators (PIs) working in the same
field and sharing the same beamline
requirements, apply to the ESRF
together for beamtime, and then share
it among themselves. Another has been
the HUB, in which PIs working on the
same scientific theme of major societal
importance not only coordinate
beamtime use but share their results,
for faster progress and more impact
see ESRFnews June 2023 p10 and
December 2023 p10 Meanwhile all
proposals have been made easier to
administer with NEXTUP a new user
portal interface
What about once users are at their
beamline
They might not even have to be there
in person thanks to modes of remote
access that were swiftly implemented
at the beginning of the COVID19
pandemic However wherever users
A major EU-funded project that supported the ESRF–EBS upgrade has concluded, leaving
a trail of benef its.
The streamlined approach
E S R F / C A R G O U D