ALBA, the Spanish synchrotron, is serving the worldwide scientific and industrial communities with state-of-the-art X-ray beamlines and instruments.
ALBA synchrotron (Barcelona, Spain) started user operation in 2012 and has gradually grown to currently operate 13 beamlines and several microscopes and services, providing access to fragment screening, serial crystallography and soft and hard X-ray tomography, among others. ALBA is now geared towards its upgrade to a 4th generation facility, ALBA-II. The project, which is on schedule to see the new photon beam on 2031, includes the construction of 3 new beamlines and the upgrade of the operating ones.
Since 2025, three ALBA beamlines are included in the portfolio of Instruct:
XALOC is a mature MX beamline with more than 1200 structures solved (2025). The beamline has recently updated the detector and the robot, and offers wavelength-dependent and jet-based SSX experiments. Onsite, remote and unattended access modes are available.
XAIRA, the new micro-MX beamline operating since 2025, provides a high-flux beam of 3×3 µm² size. The beamline can host fixed-target SSX experiments, as well as low-background rotation and optimal native-phasing experiments by enclosing the entire end-station in a recirculating helium atmosphere. Onsite and remote experiments are available.
MISTRAL provides access to cryo soft X-ray tomography to resolve the 3D structure of whole vitrified cells of up to 10 um thickness and depth at near native conditions at ~30nm resolution, as well as to perform cryo-spectromicroscopy experiments to locate oligoelements. A cryo 3D-SIM microscope is available to select offline the samples in the grid to collect. Typically MISTRAL is able to collect a hundred tomograms from two full grids per day.
Carrer de la Llum, 2, 26
08290 Cerdanyola del Vallès
Barcelona
Spain
Reception is open 9am-5pm
Onsite experiments are possible in all instruments. XALOC and XAIRA offer remote access. In addition, XALOC offers unattended experiments.
Beamlines XALOC and XAIRA are dedicated to macromolecular crystallography (MX) to provide the 3D structures of proteins, oligonucleotides and protein-protein, protein-DNA or protein-ligand complexes.
The two MX beamlines, XAIRA and XALOC, share resources to tailor the project needs through a joint proposal submission system. A new dewar shipment system and a new data portal to provide a single access point, automated processing and a catalog identification for all data acquired following FAIR data principles are being implemented to improve user experience.
ALBA, the Spanish synchrotron facility, is fully committed to serve the worldwide scientific and industrial communities with state-of-the-art instrumentation and services to address the challenges of our time, most notably in Life Sciences. ALBA is currently operating 11 beamlines, with three more under design or construction phase. Since the start of user operation in 2012, ALBA has catered 8,500 researchers, half of them from European and international institutes. Three beamlines, MISTRAL, XALOC and XAIRA, are of special relevance for the activities of the Instruct-ERIC initiative.
