The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $6.5 million to Berkeley Lab to integrate existing synchrotron structural biology resources to better serve researchers. The grant will establish a center based at the Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) called ALS-ENABLE that will guide users through the most appropriate routes for answering their specific biological questions.
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As part of an international team, researchers with Berkeley Lab’s Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA) employed their multi-tiered iterative phasing (M-TIP) algorithm to process X-ray free laser (XFEL) data taken from single virus particles and resolve their nanometer-scale structures in 3D. The new approach circumvents several challenges of imaging biomolecules that do not crystallize well, such as the random orientations of particles in solution and the asymmetrical structures of many viruses and proteins. Jeff Donatelli of the Computational Research Division’s Mathematics Group and Peter Zwart and Kanupriya Pande of the Biosciences Area’s Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) division contributed to the work, the results of which were published in Physical Review Letters. Read more from the Berkeley Lab News Center.
Several Berkeley Lab researchers contributed to the foundational work leading to the development of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), for which Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Among those cited in the Scientific Background are Biosciences’ Bob Glaeser, Ken Downing, and Eva Nogales.
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A study led by Cheryl Kerfeld, with colleagues from Biosciences’ Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, as well as her MSU-DOE Plant Research group at Michigan State University, made the cover of the August 2017 issue of Nature Plants. Matthew Melnicki, Markus Sutter, and Fei Cai of MBIB contributed to the study, which characterized a recently identified member of the orange carotenoid family of proteins (OCPs). These proteins change conformation in response to ambient light conditions to protect the host cyanobacteria from harmful exposure. Compared to the canonical exemplar, OCP1, the new OCP, called OCP2, requires relatively higher light intensity for activation, but it reacts faster than OCP1. The goal of Kerfeld’s OCP research is to understand how the various members of the family work, and use that knowledge to engineer the protein for applications in renewable energy and medicine. Read more from the MSU-DOE Plant Research Lab.
Carolyn Larabell, a professor at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine and a faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division at Berkeley Lab, has been selected by the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Users’ Executive Committee to receive the 2017 David A. Shirley Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement. Larabell directs the National Center for X-Ray Tomography (NCXT) centered around ALS Beamline 2.1, the world’s first soft x-ray microscope for biological imaging, and she led the group responsible for its commissioning, design, and construction. Soft x-ray tomography makes it possible to image intact biological cells in 3-D without structure-damaging preparation such as chemically fixing, dehydrating, and staining the specimens. On October 3, Larabell will give her award talk, entitled “The Expanding Universe of Cell Biology at the NCXT,” during the ALS User Meeting at Berkeley Lab. Read more in ALS News & Updates.
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