Next-generation detectors ready for experiments at CHESS
Two new detectors developed by Sydor Technologies are now available for user experiments at CHESS.
Two new detectors developed by Sydor Technologies are now available for user experiments at CHESS.
FlexX is shorthand for “Flexible Beamline for Macromolecular Crystallography,” where the second, capital “X” stems from a common shorthand for “Crystal,” or “X-tal.” The name also indicates the flexibility of the beamline in accommodating a wide variety of crystallography-related experiments. Finke and the beamline work to accommodate challenging experiments that would be difficult to perform at other beamlines across the U.S.
Mario Ramos-Garcés, CHESS User and former Ph.D. student at UPR-Río Piedras has been honored by the American Chemical Society's Division of Inorganic Chemistry with the Young Investigator Award for his Ph.D. research.
The Cingolani group (Thomas Jefferson U) has now determined the structure of TerS from the Pseudomonas phage PaP3. Phage DNA to be packaged contains multiple copies of the genome, but just one copy is needed to fill a procapsid. Terminases attempt to package this one copy by various methods; in PaP3 a termination signal is provided by the interaction of a specific sequence in the DNA (the cos sequence) with TerS.
What is the new discovery?
The experiment employed an AI-driven, fully autonomous infrastructure controlled across campus from CHESS to direct the synthesis and characterization in combinatorial thin-film material processing. Using high-throughput, closed-loop robotics, new materials were synthesized through laser-annealing, analyzed with x-ray diffraction, and the resulting data was fed into a machine-learning model to propose the next best experiment.