Cornell University's High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) recently hosted a multi-day workshop on High Energy X-ray Techniques (HEXT) from May 16 to 17, 2023. The workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation and aimed to introduce students from the Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) program to synchrotron methods, emphasizing their applications to a wide variety of research questions.
The development, outlined in a paper published March 3 in Nature Communications, provides researchers with the tools to interpret the once-discarded data from X-ray crystallography experiments – an essential method used to study the structures of proteins. This work, which builds on a study released in 2020, could lead to a better understanding of a protein’s movement, structure and overall function.
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.