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A team based at Diamond Light Source is part of an exciting collaborative grant programme, which will lead in developing new software for macromolecular crystallography (MX) scientists across the world. This £0.5M investment from BBSRC to Diamond will bring together a consortium of research teams from the Universities of Southampton, Liverpool, Newcastle and York, as well as the Science and Technology Facility Council (STFC) and LMB Cambridge, tackling different aspects of software tools for structural biology. BBSRC have invested a total of £2M in the consortium to support this activity.
Leading the work for Diamond, is a cross-team group including Mike Hough, Principal Beamline Scientist on VMXi, Allen Orville, Principal Scientist at Diamond’s XFEL Hub, Gwyndaf Evans, Principal Beamline Scientist on VMXm and Deputy Director of Life Sciences, and Graeme Winter, Principal Software Scientist for the MX group. The team will use the funding to primarily focus on new ways of analysing data from time-resolved structural experiments, which will allow researchers to optimise their experiments in real time. Project lead Mike Hough explains the aims of the work:
“We are working to be able to better understand when something is actually changing during an experiment, so that we are able to optimise it while we are taking data, rather than needing to do everything afterwards in the hopes that things worked.”
This will be extremely relevant to the work taking place at several beamlines at Diamond: I24, VMXi and that of the XFEL Hub collaboration. In addition to this strand of work, the Diamond team will be helping LMB Cambridge in their efforts to find new ways to model and complete structures in time-resolved structural biology. Mike Hough continues:
“The best analogy is that we are making a movie of how a protein works, containing multiple frames, and at the moment, each “frame” is analysed completely independently without any knowledge of what came before or after it. These tools being developed have the potential to track what is actually happening and changing through these “molecular movies” to not only make the frames more consistent with each other, but also to greatly increase the amount of information an experiment can produce.”
This investment in developing the next suite of structural biology tools for scientists is part of a continuing plan of work taking place at Diamond, with future updates planned in the lead up to Diamond’s transformative Diamond-II upgrade programme.
Dave Stuart FRS, MRC Professor of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford, Head of the Division of Structural Biology at the Department of Clinical Medicine, and Life Sciences Director at Diamond Light Source concludes:
The speed at which this field is developing is astonishing, and programmes like this are fundamental to bring together the best of the community to create the best tools for future sciences. Structural biology discoveries have helped us develop therapies and evolve treatments for some of the most significant human health challenges of our times, from COVID-19 to Foot and Mouth Disease Virus, and it’s vital to continue investing in research.
Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
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