Remote Access Experiments at the Macromolecular Crystallography Beamlines of the ESRF

Today, synchrotron-based macromolecular crystallography (SRMX) beamlines are increasingly automated with an emphasis on pushing data collection speeds and sample throughput rates to the highest reasonably possible values. While these facilities are designed to be user-friendly, somewhat paradoxically the speed with which single-crystal diffraction data can now be collected, and the resulting crystal structures solved, actually places a great deal of stress on many external users.