A short history of Auto-Rickshaw.

Abstract

Auto-Rickshaw was developed in the early 2000s at EMBL Hamburg as an automated macromolecular structure-determination platform for crystallography and structural biology. Its initial motivation was to provide beamline users with rapid feedback on whether diffraction data were sufficient for structure solution. The platform was not merely a wrapper around existing crystallographic programs; it encoded the expert decisions needed to select phasing, density-modification, model-building and refinement protocols according to the information available from the experiment. Since its first publication in 2005, Auto-Rickshaw has supported a broad range of experimental and model-based strategies, including SAD, MAD, SIR, SIRAS, RIP, molecular replacement and hybrid approaches such as MRSAD. A central feature was the integration of the SHELX programs, particularly SHELXC, SHELXD and SHELXE, whose speed, robustness and command-line design made them especially suitable for automated pipelines. This review gives a brief historical account of Auto-Rickshaw, the beamline context in which it emerged, the design principles that shaped it and the role of SHELX programs in its phasing architecture. It also considers the broader legacy of Auto-Rickshaw as a bridge between crystallographic expertise and automated, reproducible structure solution. Finally, the review places Auto-Rickshaw in the current landscape of synchrotron technologies, high-throughput structural biology, containerized deployment, predicted structural models and AI-assisted decision making, where reliable automation remains essential.