Teaming up with the French Embassy
Diamond has entered a partnership with the Science and Technology Department of the French Embassy in London to further collaborations between the UK’s national synchrotron and scientists based in France.
Emulating a scheme pioneered a few years ago with the Joint European Torus, the Culham-based nuclear fusion facility, the new partnership aims to strengthen and develop the network of scientific and technical collaborations already built up with French research groups and France based synchrotron machines, Soleil and the ESRF. The funding provided by the French Embassy will be dedicated to the support of French students visiting Diamond while working on collaborative projects.
Two Diamond groups already engaged in bilateral collaborations will benefit from the first round of funding. The first collaboration brings together the Catty group based at CEA Grenoble with the Sorensen group (Macromolecular Crystallography Beamline I02) at Diamond in order to study Listeria Monocytogenes as a model for toxic heavy metal efflux pumps.
The bacterial pathogen Listeria Monocytogenes, is known to be resistant to Cadmium (Cd), a heavy metal that can cause damage to living organisms, including microorganisms, plants and human beings. Understanding how microorganisms and plants become resistant to heavy metals is of practical significance, potentially leading to bioremediation solutions in the future. In the case of L. Monocytogenes, the accumulation of Cd2+ in the bacteria is prevented by a cation efflux pump mechanism, one of the mechanisms acquired by microorganisms to adapt to the presence of heavy toxic metals.
The CEA group is researching the kinetic and enzymatic parameters of the cation efflux pump in L. monocytogenes while the Diamond group has extensive experience in obtaining crystal structures for proteins similar to CadA, the membrane protein that pumps cations in the pathogen. This collaboration should enable the groups to optimize their purification and protein production techniques and further research in heavy metal homeostasis.
The second collaborative project unites three scientists, namely Ganesh Sockalingum from Université de Reims, Josep Sulé-Suso from University Hospital of North Staffordshire and Gianfelice Cinque from the Infrared beamline at Diamond. Its aim is to use the synchrotronbased FTIR (Fourier Transform InfraRed) microscopy available on the Diamond Infrared (IR) beamline B22 to study single cancer cells growth process in a 3D-model collagen matrix, specifically how the extracellular matrix affects the cellular invasion in the presence or absence of chemotherapy drugs. This could also provide a better understanding of some of the processes behind the development of tumour metastases.
Synchrotron radiation IR brightness is essential in molecular microscopy studies, since it enables the scientists to achieve the highest spatial resolution and the maximum spectroscopical signal-to-noise ratio in order to access both intra-cellular and peri-cellular biochemical information. Such information is crucial for performing cancer research at the smallest cellular scale achievable or, in other terms, to improve our understanding of the biology at a single cell level.
The benefit of this collaborative research resides in the fact that three experimental groups with different approaches (academic, hospital and research) and using experimental methodologies (clinical, IR microscopy and Raman spectroscopy) are involved in order to shed some light on the early stages of cancer development and chemotherapy effects again at the cellular level. Professor Trevor Rayment, Diamond’s Physical Science Director, welcomes the partnership with the French Embassy.
Professor Trevor Rayment