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G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the single most important drug target in the body because they are central to so many biological processes. Gaining a better understanding of how GPCRs operate will help scientists develop novel strategies to modulate their activity, potentially affecting their role in diseases such as Parkinson’s or conditions such as insomnia.
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Killer T-cells in the human body which help protect us from disease can inadvertently destroy cells that produce insulin, new research has uncovered.
The study, which is based on experimental data collected at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, provides the first evidence of this mechanism in action and could offer new understanding of the cause of Type 1 diabetes.
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Diamond Light Source has recently played a key role in helping to reveal the exact structure of the most complex non-DNA molecular knot prepared to date.
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Diamond Light Source is inviting the public to vote for their favourite Flash Fiction short story, as part of its Light Reading story writing competition.
Supporting Oxford’s bid to be UNESCO World Book Capital 2014, Diamond has been encouraging the nation to get creative and write short stories inspired by the synchrotron’s science output and the facility itself.
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Ice cores drilled from the frozen Antarctic landscape are made up of layer upon layer of frozen snow, dating back hundreds of thousands of years. Trapped within the ice are minute dust particles which can yield valuable information on temperature, precipitation, atmospheric composition and volcanic activity, frozen at the time of the snowfall. A group of Italian scientists have been using one of Diamond’s spectroscopy beamlines, B18, and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource to ...
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Diamond’s X-ray Imaging and Coherence beamline has welcomed its first users. Researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield worked with the beamline team to develop techniques on the coherence branch of I13.
Professor John Rodenburg from the University of Sheffield, one of the lead researchers on the project, said, “We were using a variety of samples as a means to test the beamline’s capabilities.
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Artificial heart valves have been used since the 1960s to replace natural heart valves damaged through disease. Each of four valves enables unimpeded blood flow through the heart itself and from the heart to the major arteries. As the heart beats the valve opens and closes, subjecting it to pressure loading and unloading. Artificial heart valves must be able to withstand repeated cycles of tensile loading and unloading in realistic conditions. Scientists from the University of Cambridge and ...
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Diamond Light Source and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) are arming the engineers of tomorrow with the vital skills and experience needed to succeed in the UK job market, as youth unemployment figures hit 1,000,000.
Run by STFC with a third of support from Diamond Light Source, the Advanced Engineering Apprenticeship scheme at STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) has been running for 19 years and is one of the best apprenticeship schemes in the country.
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A key mechanism by which a bacterial pathogen causes the deadly tropical disease melioidosis has been discovered by an international team of scientists.
The findings are published today (11th November 2011) in the journal Science and show how a toxin produced by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei kills cells by preventing protein synthesis. The study, led by the University of Sheffield, paves the way for the development of novel therapies to combat the bacterium which infects millions ...
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Thin multilayer structures comprising of thin layers of alternating elements or compounds find widespread technological applications – be it the anti-reflection coating in the visible range or the waveguide structures for X-rays. In the X-ray regime they are also used in many technological applications such as X-ray astronomy, microscopy, spectroscopy, and as filters and monochromators for synchrotron radiation and free electron X-ray lasers. It is important to correlate the measured optical ...
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With the phase-out of incandescent light bulbs becoming more common around the world, there is a need to investigate more efficient and robust alternatives. Thanks to their low energy consumption, prolonged lifetime, small size and reliability, Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are seen as an attractive option. But they are not quite ready to take over from the light bulb yet. A bright white LED powerful enough to light up a room is currently very expensive. Research is underway to make white ...
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Parchment has been used for recording historical information since at least the 2nd century BC and makes an important contribution to our nation’s cultural heritage. Parchments are routinely assessed for degradation, but techniques with higher spatial resolution are needed to assess what is happening on the microscopic/nanoscopic scale. A group of scientists from Slovenia, Germany and the UK have been using I22, Diamond’s Small Angle Scattering and Diffraction beamline along with infrared ...
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Nanoparticles have been incorporated in many consumer products, however their safety and toxicity have not been clearly identified. This is made worse by difficulty in measuring how biological systems interact with nanoparticles.
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Huntington’s disease (HD) is a dominantly-inherited neuropsychiatric disorder. Typically the symptoms begin in adulthood, slowly progressing from movement disorder to behavioural and cognitive disturbances, often manifested in depression and dementia. It has been known since 1993 that the disease is due to mutation of a single gene coding for huntingtin (HTT) that extends the poly-glutamine (poly-Q) repeats in the protein. Aggregation of poly-Q repeat fragments is considered to be the ...
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Oxfordshire residents are invited to take part in Diamond’s short story writing competition. Light Reading calls for participants to write a story up to 3,000 words, in any genre, inspired in some way by the science facility. Today saw the announcement of the winner of the staff pilot competition, which proved to be a great success.
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During the course of their treatment, around half of cancer patients receive some type of radiation therapy. This therapy is widely used to target tumours and modern techniques aim to avoid dose to healthy tissue as much as possible. However, toxicity developing within healthy tissue is still a problem and, as a result, scientists are looking for new techniques that can make cancer cells more sensitive to radiation.
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Scientists from Imperial College London and Diamond Light Source have revealed the structure of a cholesterol-lowering-drug target.
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Bacteria are single-celled organisms that inhabit almost every environment on the planet, including the bodies of humans and animals. The cell wall maintains the structural integrity of the cell, and enables the bacteria to survive in its chosen environment. In disease-causing bacteria (pathogens) it also plays a role in the progression of the disease. A group of scientists from Newcastle University and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan have used Diamond to identify a ...
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Nobel Prize winner Venki Ramakrishnan was among more than 200 scientists from across the UK who gathered at Diamond this week for the Synchrotron User Meeting 2011.
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Scientists have succeeded in purifying a protein found in bacteria that could reveal new drug targets for inherited breast and ovarian cancers as well as other cancers linked to DNA repair faults. They used Diamond Light Source to solve the structure of the protein.
