The MX beamline will be completely new. It will be used to elucidate the mechanisms of proteins and nucleic acids at molecular level and provide guidelines for developing new drugs and therapies. Substantial funding for the design and construction of this beamline is being provided by the Jordanian Scientific Research Support Fund, in response to a joint proposal by SESAME and Jordan University. It will be a state-of-the art MX beamline, based on an in vacuum undulator, and will have robotic sample handling and utilize a high performance photon counting detector. Protein crystallography studies at synchrotrons have contributed to the award of five Nobel prizes, the first in 1997 and the latest in 2012. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies use these beamlines heavily to test new lead compounds with the aim of reducing the time and cost of developing new drugs. Atomic-scale information on biological macromolecules provides insights into functional mechanisms of biological macromolecules, including membrane proteins, protein-DNA and Protein-RNA complexes. It is envisaged that at early stages there will be strong collaborations with recombinant protein production and crystallization laboratories in the region, e.g. Jordan University and the Israel Structural Proteomics Center (ISPC), which is a centre of the European Union’s Integrated Structural Biology Infrastructure project, Instruct.
The beamline is presently under design: the expected performances will be published at a later stage.