The challenge now is to efficiently use these expensive techniques - and the enormous datasets they produce - to better understand existing problems and gain insight into new phenomena that have been previously unreachable.
CHESS has been at the heart of this explosive growth, and will now develop new, efficient experimental and data processing protocols for using these techniques.
"Drowning in Data"
What is the discovery?
Steve is very interested in structural biology methods that let us see "molecular movies" -- i.e. how molecular machines like enzymes actually work. Diffuse scattering is one such method that he’s worked on with Nozomi Ando's group. But he’s also interested in using time-resolved techniques to include more types of perturbations, such as temperature, pressure, and electric fields.
The CHEX Lending Library is a far-reaching program. In the past year, a total of 3,560 students have used our kits including 1,011 underrepresented minority students and 1,770 female students. The Lending Library provides students with the opportunity to interact with lessons and kits they would not otherwise have access to.
Rebecca, an experienced teacher at Cortland High School in New York State, sent us a heartfelt thank you note (after implementing the DNA Profiling Lab) that read in part:
The center, part of the Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) program supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, was created in 2018 with an initial $10.75 million grant from the DOE Office of Science.
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Richard Gillilan, BioSAXS guru, assisted in running a workshop on small-angle scattering. He also co-chaired the session "Phase Separation and Aggregation of Biomolecular Systems and Intrinsically Disordered Proteins", and gave a talk in it about the use of multi-protein simulations and structure factor measurements. It was noteworthy that all the speakers at the session reported on work done at the CHESS BioSAXS station!