This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This Major Research Instrumentation-Recovery and Reinvestment (MRI-R2) award funds the development of a synchrotron beamline for high-resolution microdiffraction analysis of biological macromolecules at the New York Structural Biology Center (NYSBC). The NYSBC is a consortium of ten New York institutions that provides infrastructure to support structural biology. NYSBC scientists are developing the synchrotron beamline on a new undulator source (X5) at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) to support current needs of the NYSBC community and to anticipate opportunities that new undulators at NSLS-II will provide. Microdiffraction is the defining capability of the new beamline, and this is a property in high demand by NYSBC scientists and other biological crystallographers. The new beamline provides highly focused x-ray beams for use in crystallographic analyses of a wide range of biological macromolecules, including enzymes, membrane proteins, DNA, RNA and assemblages of multiple macromolecular components, and is based on a novel monochromator design that focuses the undulator radiation into stable microbeams with exceptional energy resolution for optimization of anomalous scattering phasing experiments. NYSBC-affiliated laboratories train hundreds of graduate students and postdoctoral trainees, and many of them will benefit from using the new beamline in their research. The broader impacts include the training of students and fellows who will use this equipment and the societal impacts of basic discoveries made from experiments at the new beamline. In addition, innovations made in this project benefit industries associated with this development. Results from the studies enabled by the new equipment are disseminated by student and faculty presentations at regional and national meetings, and through publication in peer-reviewed journals.
