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David Willetts MP, Minister for Universities and Science, met scientists, engineers and industrial partners at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility, and formally inaugurated Diamond’s Phase III development, as part of his visit to Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire on Monday 14th March.
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Scientists have used Diamond Light Source and other synchrotrons to reveal the shape of the protein that gives human tissues their elastic properties. This discovery might lead to the development of new synthetic elastic polymers.
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Accelerator physicists working on the recently funded SuperB accelerator in Italy have been collaborating with Diamond’s accelerator physicists to test new techniques for low emittance tuning, which can potentially benefit both Diamond and the SuperB.
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Oxford MP Nicola Blackwood enjoyed a whirlwind tour of Diamond Light Source, and gained insights into of the nano-scale structure of materials as diverse as engineering components and protein molecules.
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Diamond Light Source and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) are combining their detector systems expertise to push the boundaries of detector development. Diamond’s largest experimental station, the X-ray Imaging and Coherence beamline (I13) will make use of the advanced technology.
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This week, Diamond Light Source achieved its first full operating week (144 hours) continuous synchrotron light for researchers.
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In general, the antibiotics that are prescribed by your GP work. Complete the prescribed course and your symptoms have gone. But in some cases, the bacteria causing the illness have developed a resistance to the drugs. We need to find a way to improve these drugs so that they can overcome this resistance. But we need to know how our drugs work before we can improve them, and one way to do this is by producing a 3D molecular image of the drug/inhibitor in action. Knowing the 3D structure of ...
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I10, the Beamline for Advanced Dichroism Experiments (BLADE) welcomed its first users this week, becoming Diamond’s 19th operational beamline.
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The University of Manchester has joined forces with Diamond Light Source to produce a world-class imaging facility.
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A new PhD student has been appointed to a joint programme with Diamond Light Source, the University of Oxford and Chroma Therapeutics. Victoria Arena will be based at the multi-disciplinary Research Complex at Harwell (RCaH), where she will undertake a three year PhD project in the area of structure-based drug design.
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On Thursday 2nd December 2010, leading scientists and policy makers gathered at Diamond Light Source for the official opening of a unique new research station that can create molecular-scale 3D images of large objects such as aerospace and engineering components, and explore their structures in atomic-scale detail.
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On Friday 19th November, over 100 students from across Oxfordshire and beyond attended a careers day that focused on the wide range of exciting opportunities that exist for engineers in the UK.
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Scientists from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and their international collaborators from Emory University, USA, and Sun Yat-sen University, China, have discovered how the Lassa virus, which causes Lassa fever, remains invisible to the human defence system and causes thousands of deaths each year.
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Virus infections in a number of insect families generally culminate in the occlusion of between one and several thousand virus particles within large proteinaceous crystalline occlusion bodies or polyhedra. Polyhedra are generally less than 7 μm in size, serve to protect the viruses from harsh environmental conditions and are made from a protein, polyhedrin, encoded by the viruses. Despite their small size, we solved the structure of polyhedra produced by the dsDNA baculovirus, Autographa ...
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Scientists from Imperial College London have used data collected at Diamond Light Source to advance the understanding of how HIV and other retroviruses infect human or animal cells. The research, which is funded by the Medical Research Council, was published in Nature this week.
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The structure determination of biomolecules, in particular of DNA and of proteins, is of utmost importance to understand their function in chemistry and biology. In recent years, DNA has become attractive as template for the creation of new materials in nano-biotechnology. The availability of synthetic DNA from automated synthesis has allowed using the sequence specific recognition of the complementary strand, together with a clever design of the DNA sequence, to form two and three ...
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In muscle, assembly of ordered striated myofibrils requires the integration of hundreds of protein subunits in a sequential, regulated way by specific protein-protein interactions. The contractile filaments, composed of actin and myosin subunits, are crosslinked at the Z-disk and M-band, respectively, to give rise to a lateral assembly of molecular machines with nanometre precision. In the sarcomeric M-band, the giant ruler proteins titin and obscurin, its small homologue obscurin-like-1 ...
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Transposons are pieces of DNA that can jump from one place to another in the genome of a cell and they make up a surprisingly large proportion of many genomes. In creating genetic diversity they have had a strong influence on the evolution of genomes. If they transpose they can directly affect gene expression, by inserting into genes or gene regulatory elements. However, their activity is more often suppressed by silencing mechanisms such as DNA methylation or RNAi. The mutational activity ...
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X-ray reflectivity (XRR) is a non-destructive technique widely used for thin layered materials characterization. The brilliance achieved by third generation synchrotron sources, such as Diamond, has opened new opportunities for the study of materials at the micro and nanoscales and has driven the development of new X-ray micro-focussing optical devices, such as kinoform lenses. We have demonstrated the first practical application of kinoform lenses for the X-ray reflectivity characterization ...
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Monocrystalline diamond films with several metal contacts were characterized as radiation detectors in terms of responsivity as a function of X-ray energy, uniformity of response as a function of the position, speed of response, and stability with the time. The responsivity as a function of X-ray energy was found consistent with the physics of the metal to diamond interface and with the characteristic of the crystal in terms of lifetime of charge carriers The uniformity of response as a ...
