Developing a better understanding of protein folding and unfolding reactions is a significant challenge for structural biology. In a new paper, a team lead by Catherine Royer from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute reports a high-pressure small-angle x-ray scattering study of the model protein CTL9-I98A in solution, which allows direct observation of the pressure-induced unfolded state.
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.
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.
Our annual Users' Meeting consists of:
The HMF beamline, to be located at CHESS’s Center for High Energy X-ray Science (CHEXS), is a partnership with the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) in Florida and the University of Puerto Rico (UPR).
The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, CHESS, has reopened for researchers after a long shutdown due to CoVID-19. Users who typically travel from all over the world to perform research at CHESS are now able to study their samples by logging in remotely from their home institution.
(From the workshop description) Small angle X-ray and neutron scattering (SAXS/SANS, or SAS) has experienced dramatic growth over the past fifteen years within the structural biology community, emerging as an important and versatile analytical technique for the study of the structure and function of biological macromolecules in solution.
Life on Earth manages to exist in the Mariana Trench and deep below the ocean floor, where extreme conditions create large effects on the behavior of biological molecules.