Nicholas Sauter, a computer senior scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, is co-leading a team working to provide a better way for scientists to study the structures of the many materials that don’t form tidy single crystals. Their new technique, called small-molecule serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography, or smSFX, supercharges traditional crystallography with the addition of custom-built image processing algorithms and an X-ray free electron laser (XFEL). In a paper published in Nature, the team demonstrated proof-of-principle for smSFX and reported the previously unknown structures of two metal-organic materials known as chacogenolates.
New Technique Gets the Drop On Enzyme Reactions
As part of an international collaboration, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the Diamond Light Source synchrotron facility, and Oxford and Bristol Universities in England have developed a novel sample delivery system that expands the limited toolkit for performing dynamic structural biology studies of enzyme catalysis, which have so far mostly been limited to a small number of light-driven enzymes.
New Refinement Technique Promises Greater Protein Structure Accuracy
X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) came into use in 2010 for protein crystallography, allowing scientists to study fully hydrated specimens at room temperature without radiation damage. Researchers have developed many new experimental and computational techniques to optimize the technology and draw the most accurate picture of proteins from crystals. Now scientists in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division have developed a new program, diffBragg, which can process every pixel collected from an XFEL for a protein structure independently. In a recent IUCrJ paper, the team led by MBIB Senior Scientist Nicholas Sauter proposed a new processing framework for more accurate determination of protein structures.
Showtime for Photosynthesis
An international team led by researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division has revealed a key step in the molecular mechanism behind the water splitting reaction of photosynthesis. The finding could help inform the design of renewable energy technology.
Superfacility Framework Advances Photosynthesis Research
An article published in the Computing Sciences News Center describes how Biosciences researchers are using a superfacility framework of experimental instrumentation with computational and data facilities to unravel the long-standing mystery of how Photosystem (PSII) works. The protein complex plays a crucial role in photosynthesis, making it key to achieving artificial photosynthesis that could produce fuels using sunlight and carbon dioxide. Researchers—led by Vittal Yachandra, Junko Yano, and Jan Kern in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB)—recently began using ESnet to enable real-time processing of experimental data collected at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at NERSC to observe this water-splitting protein in action. Asmit Bhowmick, a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of MBIB senior scientist Nicholas Sauter, is quoted in the article.
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