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”.
Synchrotron radiation sources have enabled revolutionary applications, that are advancing understanding of the electronic and structural nature of atomic scale systems containing transition-metal atoms.
CHESS is pioneering the development of new x-ray optics and spectrometers for this purpose and a small, extremely productive community of users has grown with this capability. It is now time for a workshop focused on communicating what we have learned, building interest, and instructing a new generation of scientists on these methods.
At the lowest level, compaction is achieved by wrapping stretches of DNA around a core of histone proteins to form nucleosomes in a “beads on a string” configuration: 147 base pairs of DNA per nucleosome, with linkers of variable length between nucleosomes. The nucleosome core particle (NCP), or one “bead”, consists of 4 types of histone (H2A, H2B, H3, and H4), each of which has a compact core plus a positively-charged, flexible tail that protrudes from the core.
The paper “Dynamics and Rheology of Soft Colloidal Glasses” came out in the January 7th edition [1].