Laboratory, optical and precision equipments (excl. glasses)

Tender description

The Francis Crick Institute (‘the Crick’) is a biomedical research institute dedicated to understanding the scientific mechanisms of living things. Its work is to find new ways to treat, diagnose and prevent illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, infections and neurodegenerative diseases. The Crick requires a state of the art macromolecular X-ray (MX) Diffraction System for direct installation into it's new building. This will provide the Crick with cutting edge equipment that will improve data collection quality and possibilities, increase throughput and allow the science undertaken to remain competitive and world-class. The X-ray generator will utilise the latest liquid metal anode technology providing a number of advantages over the alternative, older solid metal, rotating anode (RAG) technology. These are: a) The most intense source of X-rays for in-house macromolecular crystallography, with a high flux density than alternatives; b) Low power consumption (approx. 200 W as opposed to 1 200 W for our existing RAG systems and approx. 3 000 W for the high end RAG) thereby reducing the operating costs; c) Single-phase power source as opposed to 3 phase 400 V; d) No requirement for house cooling water thereby reducing the cost and maintenance associated; e) Liquid anode is at the cutting edge of current technology and is at an early stage in it's development cycle. This will allow for possible new developments to be introduced that should produce even more focused and intense radiation in the future, further enhancing capabilities. The availability of an in-situ plate adapter avoids the need to manipulate crystals before analysing them. This technology is becoming more mainstream as exemplified by the fact that a beam-line at the Diamond Light Source Limited is currently being built solely for this technique. The state of the art pixel array detectors, now available, offer significant improvements in data quality, sensitivity and speed over our current image plate detectors. Image plate detectors use technology that is 2 generations out-of-date and data collection is slow, limiting time available. Technology similar to the proposed pixel array detector is currently in use at the synchrotrons. Finally access to the national resource available for X-ray crystallography (Diamond Light Source) is getting increasingly competitive and together with the proposed closure for upgrade of the synchrotron beam-lines and lattice (expected 2018-21), available of a capable in-house system is paramount.