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Looking to purchase or build an in-house SAXS camera, suggestions?

Dear SAS Newsgroup:

I am interested in either building or purchasing an in-house SAXS
spectrometer to study the structure of protein molecules in solution. Can
anyone suggest or comment on any available products (E.g. MBraun Kratky
camera) or issues related to building a camera?

One issue to consider is that proteins scatter very weakly unlike most
synthetic polymers. This makes having a low background signal and high flux
critical. One option is to build a ~2meter spectrometer using a ~10 cm
focusing mirror (e.g. Charles Supper Co. sells very nice assemblies at a
reasonable cost), a 10 cm position sensitive detector (e.g. TEC model 200)
, and a 2kW sealed tube X-ray source with line focus. The focusing mirror
is very desirable for flux reasons when using a sealed tube source. Q-range
should be ~0.005 - 0.3 Ang-1.

Also, does anyone know if CCD-based position sensitive detectors have
become comparably priced to Xe filled detectors?

TIA

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Tobin R. Sosnick, Ph.D
trsosnic@midway.uchicago.edu                        (773) 834-0657 (office)
Dept. of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology    (773) 702-0439 (fax)
University of Chicago                                          
920 E. 58th Street
Chicago, Il 60637
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**  "If it was easy, someone else would have done it by now."   **
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