With funding from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program, Berkeley Lab researchers from the Computational Research Division (CRD) and the Biosciences Area are collaborating to explore how brain-inspired computer chips might benefit science.
X-rays Capture Unprecedented Images of Photosynthesis in Action
An international team of scientists is getting closer to discovering how plants split water during photosynthesis and produce nearly all of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Thanks to unprecedented, atomic-scale images of a protein complex found in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria captured by ultrafast X-ray lasers, researchers conducted atomic-level experiments to help delineate the mechanism of this system that also yields the protons and electrons used to reduce carbon dioxide to carbohydrates later in the photosynthesis cycle. The effort to uncover the secrets of this protein complex, photosystem II, was led by Vittal Yachandra and Junko Yano in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division and the team’s findings were published this week in Nature.
Biosciences Researchers to Support Two Exascale Projects
Biosciences researchers will contribute their expertise to two new projects, “Data Analytics at the Exascale for Free Electron Lasers” and “Exascale Solutions for Microbiome Analysis,” funded by DOE to develop cutting-edge research applications for next-generation supercomputers as part of DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a component of President Obama’s National Strategic Computing Initiative that intends to maximize the benefits of high-performance computing for U.S. economic competiveness, national security and scientific discovery. ECP announced its first round of funding on September 7 with the selection of 15 application development proposals for full funding and seven proposals for seed funding.
X-rays Reveal New Path In Battle Against Mosquito-borne Illness
MBIB researchers were part of a team that used SLAC’s X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) – the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility – to get atomic views of the toxin BinAB, used as a larvicide to control mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, West Nile virus and viral encephalitis. The structure of this bacterial toxin was solved using de novo phasing: the protein crystals were tagged with heavy metal markers, tens of thousands of diffraction patterns were collected using the XFEL, and the information was combined to obtain a three-dimensional map of the electron density of the protein. The Berkeley team, headed by Senior Scientist Nicholas Sauter, acquired and processed data for the study, published in Nature last week.
Instrumentation Advances Expand the Reach of X-ray Free Electron Lasers
Femtosecond crystallography (FX) is especially suitable for studying radiation sensitive enzymes that require metals for their function, as the extremely short and bright X-ray pulses can produce a diffraction image before any atomic motions can occur in the crystal. This cutting edge method is capable of extending our capacity to study smaller, more fragile crystals and determine the catalytic structures of biologically relevant macromolecules.
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