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BioMAX is the first macromolecular crystallography beamline at the first fourth-generation storage ring, the 3 GeV storage ring at MAX IV Laboratory. It is a highly automated, user-friendly, microfocus beamline that provides excellent performance for most macromolecular crystallography applications., BioMAX is the first macromolecular crystallography beamline at the MAX IV Laboratory 3 GeV storage ring, which is the first operational multi-bend achromat storage ring. Due to the low-emittance storage ring, BioMAX has a parallel, high-intensity X-ray beam, even when focused down to 20 µm × 5 µm using the bendable focusing mirrors. The beam is tunable in the energy range 5–25 keV using the in-vacuum undulator and the horizontally deflecting double-crystal monochromator. BioMAX is equipped with an MD3 diffractometer, an ISARA high-capacity sample changer and an EIGER 16M hybrid pixel detector. Data collection at BioMAX is controlled using the newly developed MXCuBE3 graphical user interface, and sample tracking is handled by ISPyB. The computing infrastructure includes data storage and processing both at MAX IV and the Lund University supercomputing center LUNARC. With state-of-the-art instrumentation, a high degree of automation, a user-friendly control system interface and remote operation, BioMAX provides an excellent facility for most macromolecular crystallography experiments. Serial crystallography using either a high-viscosity extruder injector or the MD3 as a fixed-target scanner is already implemented. The serial crystallography activities at MAX IV Laboratory will be further developed at the microfocus beamline MicroMAX, when it comes into operation in 2022. MicroMAX will have a 1 µm × 1 µm beam focus and a flux up to 1015 photons s−1 with main applications in serial crystallography, room-temperature structure determinations and time-resolved experiments.

The outstanding success of structural biology within the last two decades is closely related to the development and evolution of macromolecular crystallography (MX) beamlines. Indeed, many of today's synchrotron-based MX experimental sessions aim for fast but rigorous evaluations and data collections from very large numbers of samples [1–7]. To facilitate this, sample changing on most MX beamlines is now carried out by robots and the centering of a crystal in the X-ray beam to micrometer precision is now automatically performed using either optical or diffraction-based techniques [8]. Once a crystal is centered, users have a wide array of options at their disposal to prepare any given experiment. This includes: X-ray fluorescence (XRF) [9] analysis to confirm the presence of anomalous scatterers in crystals; X-ray absorption near-edge scans (XANES) to determine the best X-ray wavelengths for MAD/SAD data collection [10]; and the probing of the diffraction properties of crystals to determine the best cryst...