The advent of third generation light sources that produce bright X-rays allow scientists to carry out experiments at speeds orders of magnitude faster than was previously possible. This workshop focused on how advances in X-ray detector development have chartered new unexplored avenues into biological sciences, making it possible, for example, to follow enzymatic reactions in real-time as they occur at near atomic resolution.
Many more than the 25 maximum registered participants attended the first day talks. Wednesday morning was devoted to science and the afternoon to practical concepts. Thursday morning offered access to and expert help with simulation and data analysis software. Following lectures and classroom training, workshop participants shared 36 hours of measurement time, using DAVES at the C1 station.
A complete list of talk titles and abstracts is available at http://meetings.chess.cornell.edu/UserMeeting2015/agenda.html#xes.
Gino, a graduate student of Zhenan Bao at Stanford and then post-doctoral associate at MIT in the group of Klavs Jensen, proceed to explain his work entitled "Understanding Organic Semiconductor Polymorphism using High Speed in-situ Optical and X-ray Diffraction Methods”. Starting this presentation he acknowledged and thanked coauthors Ruipeng Li and Detlef Smilgies (CHESS), Aram Amassian (KAUST), and Zhenan Bao.
After the well-attended and successful BioSAXS training workshop held at the 2013 annual meeting, the ACA approved a new program that will bring together structural biologists and soft matter scientists interested in gaining expertise in SAS.
In many cases, these software packages are “research code”: works in progress written by scientists, not software developers, who are willing to share their effort with other scientists. Users frequently find that obtaining and running such software can be difficult and time consuming. In response, researchers at CHESS have been contributing to a new open-source package manager developed by Continuum Analytics called “Conda”, which provides simple access to a wide variety of scientific software packages written in C, Fortran, Python, R, etc.
A team of Cornell researchers led by Tobias Hanrath (Chemical Engineering) and Detlef Smilgies (CHESS) recently published a pilot study in which structure and optical adsorption were measured simultaneously, as the nanorods were exposed to solvent vapor in an in-situ cell with optical transmission ports [1]. The main goal of the study was to establish the basic relationship of the structure and optical properties of the nanorod film and how each can be influenced by external stimuli.
In the 1970s, canine parvovirus type 2 (CPV-2) came to the scene, and had spread around the world by 1978 to be almost completely replaced by a mutant CPV-2a variant by the end of the eighties. The CPV-2a variant has a broad host range infecting both domestic and wild carnivores (incl. dogs and cats). It’s been hypothesized that CPV-2a may be displacing FPV-like viruses in many wild carnivore hosts. Understanding the structural basis of virus-host recognition is therefore of utmost importance to be able to design strategies for intercepting infections with this high-fatality rate virus.
The Integrated Science Club from Appleby College travelled hundreds of miles to the United States to spend three days analyzing specimens using X-ray Fluorescence at our facility.
The peptides are derived from larger proteins that are active in infection, nuclear translocation and budding of new viruses. The current project, peptide MA31, is derived from the N-terminus of the Gag Matrix protein; this has been one focus of three of our trips to CHESS, the most recent in March, 2015.
Ashley is currently working for mentor Aaron Stebner, Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the Colorado School of Mines. She graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wyoming in August 2013 and is currently in her second year pursuing a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with a thesis title “Quantifying the Multiscale Mechanics of Phase Transformation, Twinning, and Slip Using High Energy Diffraction Microscopy”.