This year has been another highly productive period for the scientific programme in the Life Sciences and it is encouraging to see that although the field is currently dominated by macromolecular crystallography, other techniques are also beginning to play a significant role. Thus, this highlights section is able to include contributions on fibre diffraction using the microfocus beamline ID13, on the contraction of muscles using beamline ID2, and on the in vivo fluorescence microtomography of plants using a second microfocus beamline, ID22. The Medical Beamline, ID17, has continued to extend its research programme and highlights are included with respect to bronchography and the measurement of blood volumes in the brain. The angiography studies involving the first human patients suffered a frustrating delay before the proposed experimental protocol was accepted by the authorities and consequently the first patient could not be received before the end of January, 2000.

In the field of Macromolecular Crystallography, a survey of the journals, Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Structural Biology, Structure, Acta Crystallographica D, Biochemistry, Journal of Molecular Biology, Journal of Biological Chemistry, EMBO Journal, Proteins: Structure, Function and Genetics, FEBS, RNA, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, for the year 1999 has revealed well over 100 structural papers where the use of the ESRF beamlines has been instrumental in undertaking a structural analysis. In addition there were several crystallisation papers and review or technical articles. Many of these papers cover work that was undertaken in 1998 (or earlier) and the beginning of 1999 when the Quadriga complex, ID14, was not fully operational. The number is therefore an underestimate compared to that which can be expected for the coming year. However, more significant than the quantity of structures is their quality and importance. Whilst it is inevitable that some of the data collected at the ESRF could also be collected elsewhere, and many of the larger problems do involve data collected at several sources, there are some structures for which the use of the high brilliance, highly collimated characteristics are mandatory. This highlights section has chosen only a few examples of the structures that have been solved using ESRF data. The Multiple-wavelength Anomalous Dispersion (MAD) technique continues to play an important role in the elucidation of new structures with the use of both BM14 and ID14/4. The speed of structure solution using MAD continues to cause amazement with reports of three structures being solved in a day by the Marseille group using Se-methionine substituted proteins, and an in-house experiment taking less than one hour from mounting the protein crystal to producing a fully interpretable electron density map. It seems that although the growth of suitable crystals is still the dominating rate-limiting step in macromolecular crystallography, the time that used to be spent on structure elucidation is now of necessity used to formulate the results as a scientific paper!

A number of technical developments have taken place during the year including the construction and commissioning of a micro-goniometer for use initially on the microfocus beamline ID13 (Acta Crystallographica, D55, 1765-70, 1999). The success of this joint EMBL-ESRF project will lead to the construction of similar goniometers for other macromolecular crystallographic beamlines. The emphasis in the future will be to use microbeams to produce usable diffraction data from microcrystals. A further project involves the construction of an automated sample exchanger for frozen protein crystals and a prototype has been tested. Clearly, for routine data collection purposes, the future will involve submitting protein samples by courier and running the data collection experiments remotely. In conjunction with this concept, software developments have also taken place to simplify and accelerate data collection for the external user community.