Available to general users for ~50% of beam time, the 12-1 beam line was realized through funding from Stanford University and The Scripps Research Institute, with additional support from the Moore Foundation, the NIH and the DOE;  BL12-1 is a preeminent macromolecular crystallography resource for structural biology research in the US designed for investigations of the most challenging macromolecular crystallography systems confronting scientists today, including cases where crystals can only be grown to a few microns in size.  BL12-1 is competitive with the performance of the best in class micro-beam instruments in the US (microbeam flux densities are 6 times that of SSRL BL12-2).  The vertical focus of the X-ray beam is 5 µm FWHM and the beam can be collimated down to ~1 µm² for the most challenging experiments.

BL12-1 is equipped with an Eiger 16M Pixel Array Detector with readout speeds greater than 100 Hz (full detector) and up to 750 Hz for regions of interest which enables ultra-high-redundancy-fine-phi-slicing SAD experiments and routine serial synchrotron crystallography (SSX) experiments.  

BL12-1 is also an effective gateway for the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), providing a common platform for instrument R&D, prescreening and characterization of micro- to nano-sized crystaline samples prior to LCLS studies.  BL12-1 has nearly identical goniometer-based equipment for fixed-target serial diffraction studies as the standard setup for the LCLS-MFX station as well as identical equipment for injector-based serial crystallography experiments.