W0297

Towards Large Molecule Crystallography at ISIS. Chick C Wilson, ISIS Facility, CLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon OX11 0QX, UK.

The development and status of single crystal diffraction facilities at the ISIS spallation neutron source in the UK will be reviewed, with particular reference to its applications in chemical crystallography and moving towards the study of larger structures.

The achievements of the SXD instrument over the last few years will be summarised, and details given of the recent upgrade of the instrument to encompass 11 area position-sensitive detectors, offering coverage of >50% of the available solid angle. The early impact of "SXD-11" will be assessed, with reference to its anticipated limitations in terms of unit cell volume and crystal size.

Plans for the recently funded ISIS Second Target Station (TS-II) will also be reviewed. TS-II will be optimized for the production of cold neutrons, making it ideally suited to the study of larger structures. Developments of relevance to large molecule chemical and biological neutron crystallography will be summarized, including details of the planned high flux, large molecule crystallography instrument, LMX. The anticipated impact of LMX (and TS-II in general) on both the chemical and biological fields will be discussed.