Operation of the Australian Store.Synchrotron for macromolecular crystallography

• Published in: Acta crystallographica. Section D, Biological crystallography. Vol. 70; no. 10; pp. 2510 - 2519
• Main Authors: Meyer, Grischa R., Aragão, David, Mudie, Nathan J., Caradoc-Davies, Tom T., McGowan, Sheena, Bertling, Philip J., Groenewegen, David, Quenette, Stevan M., Bond, Charles S., Buckle, Ashley M., Androulakis, Steve
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 5 Abbey Square, Chester, Cheshire CH1 2HU, England International Union of Crystallography 01.10.2014; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: Australia; Australian Store.Synchrotron; CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY; CRYSTALLOGRAPHY; Crystallography, X-Ray; CRYSTALS; data archiving; Data Curation - methods; DIFFRACTION; Diffraction Data Deposition; IMPLEMENTATION; MATHEMATICAL SOLUTIONS; Neutrons; OPERATION; SOLUTIONS; SYNCHROTRONS; Workflow; Australia; data archiving; Australian Store.Synchrotron
• ISSN: 1399-0047; 0907-4449; 1399-0047
• DOI: 10.1107/S1399004714016174

The Store.Synchrotron service, a fully functional, cloud computing‐based solution to raw X‐ray data archiving and dissemination at the Australian Synchrotron, is described. The service automatically receives and archives raw diffraction data, related metadata and preliminary results of automated data‐processing workflows. Data are able to be shared with collaborators and opened to the public. In the nine months since its deployment in August 2013, the service has handled over 22.4 TB of raw data (∼1.7 million diffraction images). Several real examples from the Australian crystallographic community are described that illustrate the advantages of the approach, which include real‐time online data access and fully redundant, secure storage. Discoveries in biological sciences increasingly require multidisciplinary approaches. With this in mind, Store.Synchrotron has been developed as a component within a greater service that can combine data from other instruments at the Australian Synchrotron, as well as instruments at the Australian neutron source ANSTO. It is therefore envisaged that this will serve as a model implementation of raw data archiving and dissemination within the structural biology research community.