Our 8^th BioSAXS Essentials training workshop drew a wide-ranging and enthusiastic crowd of 36 students, including 6 from University of Puerto Rico, 1 from Korea, 2 from Estonia and 1 from Canada. About half of the students had never collected data at a synchrotron before!

Participants from 23 institutions and companies joined the meeting in person on the Cornell campus and online via YouTube live.

In bacteria, this system is known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats, see CHESS news item: Adaptive Immune Systems of Bacteria, 2012) and consists of RNA which recognizes and binds the foreign DNA or RNA through an RNA-mediated interference mechanism and a number of Cas (CRISPR-associated) proteins which help to either form the complex or to degrade the foreign DNA. The complex is known as CASCADE (CRISPR-Associated Complex for Antiviral Defense).

The workshop convened 6 speakers, all expert practitioners in various topics related to BioSAXS, who in a full first day of lectures, provided a solid foundation of the theory and application of solution X-ray scattering to an eager class with various industrial and academic appointments.

To understand this critical cellular process, biologists are studying the fine details of the structural changes involved, and how they are regulated. RNAP complexes vary from one species to another, but a core subset of proteins is found throughout archaeal and eukaryotic life forms. Comparison of archaeal and eukaryotic proteins reveals how structural motifs have been modified during evolution, so that function is maintained while regulation has become more complex in eukaryotic species.

What did the scientists discover?

Previous studies have shown the inhibitory properties of sweeteners, such as saccharin, to CA IX. In this study, the binding of the sweetener acesulfame potassium (Ace K) is compared between CA IX and other essential carbonic anhydrases in the body.

What did the Scientists Discover?

He has used X-ray crystallography at CHESS, as well as other resources, to decipher the operation of the Golgi apparatus, the cell's sorting depot. Read the announcement from the Guggenheim Foundation here and a story from the Cornell Chronicle here.

Surprisingly, cells also have a completely alternate means of producing small special-purpose polypeptides which act as antibiotics or various other environmentally-friendly compounds of therapeutic importance. Instead of the ribosome, cells use a very large protein complex called nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) to produce these compounds. Like a molecular assembly line, the different subunits of an NRPS each perform a critical step in the process and, using moving parts, hand off the product to the next domain.

Thirty students from fourteen different institutions (including ones as far away as UC Irvine and the University of Puerto Rico) attended the workshop in person, and fifteen students from eleven institutions and companies attended the course remotely via WebEx and YouTube Live. Five different expert instructors gave students a day and a half of lectures and hands-on tutorials in SAXS fundamentals, data collection, and data processing.