Chi-Chang's Corner

Exciting Funding News for NSLS Bioscience Consortium, Detector Development

September 9, 2009

Chi-Chang Kao
NSLS Department Chair
kao@bnl.gov

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We just received word that funding for one of our largest consortia, Case Western Reserve University's Center for Synchrotron Biosciences (CSB), has been renewed through the National Institutes of Health. The CSB, which operates five NSLS beamlines and serves more than 550 users, will receive a five-year, $4 million grant to continue to study the structure and dynamics of proteins and nucleic acids. Since its creation in 1995, the CSB has stimulated the development and application of numerous synchrotron radiation tools and produced a great deal of groundbreaking science.

The NSLS Detectors Group also recently received some good news. The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded us $100,000 to continue the development of a new generation of x-ray detectors that use germanium sensors, an effort that we started under a BNL Laboratory Directed Research and Development grant. The lack of detectors that perform well at high x-ray energies is a real problem for many experiments. At high energies, germanium-based sensors are much more efficient than equivalent ones based on silicon, but the technology currently used for making these sensors is not amenable to making monolithic planar segmented devices such as microstrip detectors. Our program will develop this technology, and subsequently, detectors based on these sensors.

Later this month, Brookhaven will host a workshop on the characterization of advanced materials under extreme environments for next-generation energy systems. The workshop will bring together experts in materials issues, advanced characterization techniques, and modeling to explore research opportunities offered by offered by current and future light sources as well as neutron sources. This is the third workshop sponsored in part by the Joint Photon Sciences Institute and I hope it will be just as successful as its predecessors in bridging basic and applied research, identifying opportunities, and forming multidisciplinary teams to address them.

As social media continues to soar in popularity, we've started a new outreach effort at the NSLS: tweeting. You can now find the latest news about the NSLS, NSLS-II, and the synchrotron world at large in 140 characters or less on our Twitter account. Follow us at www.twitter.com/BNLlight.

I also have some very sad news to report. Ed Losee, a senior technical specialist at the NSLS, died on August 9, 2009 at the age of 51. Ed first came to Brookhaven Lab in 1988, and after serving multiple roles in the Central Shops Division and the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron Department, he joined the NSLS in 2005. Colleagues remember Ed as outgoing, humorous, and an extremely hard worker. He will be greatly missed.

Finally, using one of the CSB-run beamlines, scientists from Johns Hopkins University have shown how ribosome assembly happens on an extremely quick timescale. Through x-ray footprinting, the research team got a detailed look at the early-stage interactions between ribosomal RNA from E. coli and the 20 proteins that make up the smaller of the ribosome's two subunits. The researchers made two important discoveries: 1) the different parts of the subunit start to assemble all at the same time. And 2) the assembly follows an "induced fit" model, where the proteins and RNA continuously adjust their structures until they're in place. You can read more in this issue of eNews.