Organising Samples into Pucks in ISPyB

If you’re using capillaries for your experiment, there’s a good chance you’re going to loading your capillaries into pucks. As you do this, you need to upload to ispyb which sample is going where, so that our robot knows where to pick your sample up from.

The Concept of Containers

A container is the database term for anything which contains your samples, and the most common container on I15-1 is a “puck”. If you’ve created samples, you will already have a container created - which we refer to as the box. The box is a conceptual container rather than a real one, and is simply the place where samples exist before/after they exist in a puck.

As you load your samples into the capillaries and place them into pucks, you need to move your samples in the database from the box to the relevant puck. A sample can only exist in one container!

Before we can move our samples, however, we need to create the containers in the database.

Creating Sample Changers

1. Log in to http://ispyb.diamond.ac.uk and find your proposal

Open

2. Click the Proposal dropdown > Assign Sample Changers and select your visit

Open

3. Click the Add New Container button

4. We identify pucks by the code on the base, and the code was registered to your proposal when the puck was sent to you. Select the correct code from the “Registered Container“ dropdown.

5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Add container.

Moving Samples into Sample Changer

1. Open the containers page (Proposal dropdown > Sample Changers)

2. Select the container into which you wish to put samples.

3. For any position on the container, you can click the dropdown in the left hand column and select the sample from the ones you’ve created

Note: If you put a sample in the wrong position, you can just go to the correct position and select it there (it will be moved from the first position to the new position).

4. Once you have successfully assigned all samples to the correct position, return your puck to Diamond.