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Visit Rigaku at booth 2420 at PITTCON
in Chicago
March 8-13. We
will be exhibiting our full line of XRD and XRF
products. |
Rigaku's Supermini
and RAPID
II have both been selected as Finalists in Laboratory Equipment
Magazine's 2009 Readers Choice Awards. Winners will be announced by February 16, 2009
Calendar
of events
Rigaku will be attending the following conferences in
the coming months:
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Joint
EMBRACE-EBI workshop,
Cambridge, UK, February 17-20
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PITTCON,
Chicago, IL, March 8-13
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APS
(American Physical Society),
Pittsburgh, PA, March 16-20
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ACS
(American Chemical Society),
Salt Lake City, UT, March 22-26
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12th
BCA/CCG Intensive Teaching School in X-Ray Structure Analysis,
Durham, UK, March 28-April 6
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WCPCW
(West Coast Protein Crystallography Workshop),
Pacific Grove, CA, April 5-8
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MRS
Spring (Materials Research Society),
San Francisco, CA, April 14-16
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CRYSTAL
26 - SSCANZ, Barossa
Valley, SA, Australia, April 14-17
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BCA
(British Crystallographic Association) XRF meeting,
Loughborough, UK, April 21-23
-
BCA
(British Crystallographic Association),
Loughborough, UK, April 21-23
-
39th
Mid-Atlantic Macromolecular Crystallography Meeting, College
Park, MD, May 28-30
Full listing of conferences
Rigaku will attend in 2009
Training
sessions
Rigaku is pleased to announce the
following training sessions in 2009: All
classes are held at Rigaku's applications laboratory in The Woodlands,
TX. 
»
Click here for more information
What
are our customers saying? The recent upgrade of optics from Blues to
VariMax HF has been a great
success. Alignment of optics is easier and sample exposure times across
many projects has been cut in half, often with improvements in the final
resolution of the data. Dr John Barker
Evotec (UK) Ltd »
Click here
for more
What's
new?
What's new at
www.Rigaku.com:
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A
new look ahead: one newsletter becomes two This
is the final edition of this unified, company-wide newsletter. We have decided to split the newsletter into
two versions, one for Life Sciences (protein crystallography and
crystallization automation) and one for Materials Analysis (which
includes XRF, small molecule crystallography, powder diffraction,
thin film diffraction and other general X-ray diffraction
techniques). Future
newsletters will be briefer and more focused, and will be
distributed somewhat more frequently. If you would like to receive both
newsletters, you don't need to do anything. You will automatically
remain on the distribution list for both. However, if you would like
to opt out of one or the other (or both), please e-mail webmaster@rigaku.com.
In the body of the e-mail specify which newsletter you would like to
receive (Life Sciences, Materials Analysis, none) and the e-mail address where you are currently receiving
this newsletter.
Vote
for your favorite classic Rigaku ACA/IUCr t-shirt  For
over twenty years, Rigaku's t-shirts have been a big hit at ACA and
IUCr conferences. This summer, we will be doing a limited reprinting
of the most popular classic t-shirt as chosen by readers of this
newsletter.
Simply
go to the voting
page, select the button next to the t-shirt of your choice and
click on the Vote button at the bottom of the page. If you enter
your e-mail address in the text box, you will be entered into a
drawing. Ten lucky winners will receive a
t-shirt with the most popular design. Only one vote will be registered
per person. Additional t-shirts
will be available at the 2009 Rigaku Fun Run at
the ACA meeting
in Toronto at the end of July.
» Enter
your vote now
Protein
structure of the month
 For
the past few months we have been honored to showcase the results of some of our customers in the new section of our
web site entitled Structure of the
Month. Users
who have recently had structures released by the Protein Data Bank
have written up short summaries of their results, including some of the home lab data collection details not normally
found in a paper or PDB deposition. The
most recent structures provide insight into the role of specific mutations in
the disease Light Chain Amyloidosis. Take a look at these
structures, along with some of the other structures solved by Rigaku customers around the world. We would love to showcase your recent results in our
Structure of the Month gallery. Please contact us with your candidate
and we will send you a Rigaku T-shirt when we go live with your structure.
» Visit
the protein structure of the month gallery
New
location for Rigaku European headquarters
In December 2007 Rigaku, the
world's #1 X-ray instrument manufacturer, established Rigaku European
Headquarters (REHQ) in Beeskowdamm, Berlin. REHQ will act to strengthen our
sales activities and provide support to our existing customers and
distributors in Europe. Since then, REHQ has been participating in exhibitions and
conferences, holding seminars and providing technical guidance to our
distributors in Europe, the CIS countries, Africa, the Middle East and South
America.
To bring our ability to provide
user support to the next level, in October 2008, REHQ was relocated to
Gross-Berliner Damm, Berlin. The new office has more floor space, and
features an application laboratory as well as showroom. The application
laboratory will be completed in March 2009 and outfitted with about 10
of our newest XRD, XRF and SCX (small molecule) systems, as well as a range
of sample preparation equipment—all the tools we need to provide effective
support to existing customers, and instrument and application demos to our
new prospects. By March 2009, REHQ will be staffed by a total of 11
employees, including application scientists, engineers and sales personnel
dedicated to improving our sales and customer support.
REHQ maintains
a close relationship with the UK office of Rigaku Americas Corporation, which handles sales and service of
instruments related to the life sciences.
Monash
University embraces automated crystallization  The
Protein Crystallography Unit within the Department of Biochemistry
and Structural Biology of Monash
University (Victoria, Australia) have chosen Rigaku for a major
macromolecular X-ray structure facilities upgrade. This major
purchase included the CrystalMation™
automated protein crystallization system, a modified HighFlux
HomeLab™ with an R-AXIS IV++ imaging plate detector and a
MicroMax™-007
HF X-ray source.
Rigaku's high-throughput systems were chosen by
Profs. Rossjohn and Wilce of Monash University as an upgrade for
their in-house Crystallization Laboratory and X-ray Diffraction
Laboratory facilities and in support of macromolecular
crystallographic studies carried out by researchers at Monash
University and their collaborative partners, which seek to
understand the structure, function and interactions of biologically
important molecules at the atomic, molecular and supra-molecular
level.
» Click here for more information
Rigaku equipment
available at Diamond Light Source's new small molecule beamline
A Rigaku Saturn
724+ detector and an ACTOR™ SM sample changing robot are among
the equipment available to scientists at Diamond Light Source's new Small Molecule
Single Crystal Diffraction beamline (I19). The first group to make
use of the beamline came from the
University of Bath's Department of Chemistry to study the
structures of metal organic frameworks (MOFs) in September.
MOFs are polymer-like materials that can act as
sensors with potential future applications in the electronics
industry. If the MOFs can successfully be converted into conducting
frameworks upon photoexcitation they could be used to carry current
through small electronic devices such as mobile phone screens, for
example. The MOF crystals that Prof. Raithby and his team are
looking at are so small (5 x 5 x 5 microns) that an instrument such as Diamond's Small Molecule
Single Crystal Diffraction beamline is essential to progress in this
field.
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Professor Paul Raithby is pictured inside I19's experimental hutch, in
front of the Rigaku Saturn 724+ detector and the
ACTOR SM sample changer.
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Prof. Raithby was delighted to achieve the first MOF
diffraction pattern on I19, he said: "It was fantastic to see
this beamline up and running and to be the first to try it out. It
has been an enormous pleasure to see it progress from an idea on
paper six years ago to a successful working reality. I19 holds huge
potential for the future developments of materials crystallography
in the UK."
» Click here for more information
 The
University of Texas at Austin creates "Cyber XRD" facility
In November, it was announced that the Department of
Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin (UT)
had chosen Rigaku as the instrument vendor for the establishment of
a Cyber-Enabled Teaching/Research X-ray Diffraction Facility funded
by a Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities: Departmental
Multi-User Instrumentation (CRIF:MU) grant from the National Science
Foundation (NSF). The instrumentation suite included: a Rigaku
SCXmini benchtop small molecule X-ray crystallography system, a
Rigaku Saturn 724+ Kappa CCD-based small molecule XRD system, and a
Rigaku RAPID II curved image plate (IP) detector XRD system. All
the instruments will be housed in Robert A. Welch Hall (WEL), with
the RAPID II and Saturn 724+ Kappa systems updating the existing
X-ray facility.
Rigaku X-ray diffraction systems were chosen by
Prof. Richard Jones, Prof. Brad Holliday and Dr. Vincent Lynch to
enhance the X-ray facilities of the Department of Chemistry and
Biochemistry in support of education and research at UT and a
consortium of "cyber enabled remote partner" (CERP)
universities distributed over Texas, Ohio, Illinois and Florida.
These institutions include: Bowling Green State University, Eastern
Illinois University, Florida Memorial University, LeTourneau
University, The University of Texas at Dallas, and University of the
Incarnate Word.
In a recent interview series, Professor Jones
explained that the CERP approach will enable institutions that
"have a high concentration of traditionally underrepresented
students ... [and] want to use single crystal X-ray diffraction for
teaching or research or both." He went on to explain that the
selection of Rigaku was based, in part, on "the quality of the
instrumentation" and that the "instrumentation perfectly
matches the kinds of activities that we want to use it for, namely
undergraduate and graduate level teaching in both chemistry and
engineering courses." Dr. Lynch elaborated that the remote
operators "will have a video hookup and [after we] align the
crystal on the instrument ... [we will] then pass instrument control
to the end user." Dr. Lynch emphasized the completeness of the
cyber partnership arrangement when he described the goal as being to
"make whatever's available [accessible] to whoever wants to use
it."
» Click here for more information
Texas
State University purchases SCXmini
 The
Department of
Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Texas
State University has purchased a Rigaku SCXmini
benchtop small molecule X-ray diffraction (XRD) crystallography instrument for
Cyber-enabled Small Molecule Structure Analysis for Research and Educational
Purposes as funded by a Major Research Instrumentation program (MRI)
grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
A Rigaku SCXmini X-ray crystallography system was chosen by
Prof. Benjamin Martin (Principal Investigator), Prof. Gary Beall (co-PI), Prof.
Michael Blanda (Co-PI), and Prof. Debra Feakes (Co-PI) to enhance the X-ray
facilities of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in support of
education and research at Texas State and a consortium of
"cyber-enabled" collaborators from Lamar University, San Antonio
College, Texas Lutheran University and Sam Houston State University. The SCXmini
X-ray diffractometer will be employed to strengthen research endeavors and spark
new explorations in areas involving: sulfide and selenide materials, solid state
linkage isomerism and ligand substitution in transition metal cyanide complexes,
conformational isomers of immobilized calix[6]arenes, polyhedral borane anions,
sulfido-bridged iron compounds and magnetostructural studies of Ni(II) dimers,
and the preparation of titanium complexes as well as a variety of other research
topics.
In a recent interview, Professors Martin and Beall explained
that the cyber-enabled collaboration approach will enable a group of Texas
institutions (which have high percentages of traditionally underrepresented
student populations) to have access to single crystal X-ray diffraction for both
teaching and research. Commenting on the purchase from Rigaku's perspective, Tom
McNulty, VP Materials Analysis, added that "what excites Rigaku about the
SCXmini, within the context of the collaboration sponsored by Texas State, is
the delivery of a broad range of experimental capabilities to a wide variety of
users. Rigaku has always envisioned the SCXmini playing a key role in the
education of undergraduate students and as a walk-up molecular structure tool
for graduate students and postdocs."
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