Wuxian Shi, PhD

My research effort is focused on structural studies of macromolecules using the technique of X-ray crystallography. I am also familiar with other synchrotron based technologies including X-ray protein footprinting and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. I have been a synchrotron beamline scientist since 2004, initially at the beamline X29 of the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS). Since the permanent shutdown of NSLS in 2014, I have transitioned to NSLS-II and am now a partner-user beamline scientist at FMX (Frontier Macromolecular Crystallography Beamline). I work collaboratively with a group of scientists and engineers from the Brookhaven National Laboratory and Case Western Reserve University and will support user data collection at the beamlines.

I am interested in developing serial crystallography capabilities at FMX. The main difficulty in macromolecular crystallography is obtaining large and well diffracting crystals. It will save a lot of time if crystallographers can work with micron-sized crystals and still get quality diffraction data to solve structures. Serial crystallography, where a full dataset is merged from hundreds or thousands of micron-sized crystals, was initially developed with X-Ray free-electron lasers at LCLS. With the new bright synchrotron sources and micro-focusing crystallography beamlines, it is now possible to do serial crystallography at a conventional synchrotron beamline. FMX is a micro-focusing beamline with the beam focused down to 1-20 micron in size. It is also equipped with a fast-framing pixel array detector and thus an ideal synchrotron beamline for developing and supporting serial crystallography.