This award partially supports a workshop at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on the use of the Free Electron Laser in the biological sciences. The workshop will have approximately 120 attendees, and it will be held in January 2011. The workshop will explore the exciting possibilities which the recent invention of the hard Xray laser offers for biology. The PIs will bring together leaders in the fields of biophysics, structural biology, biochemistry, accelerator physics, and diffraction physics to review the research opportunities which the unique capabilities of the many Free Electron Lasers (FELs) which are being constructed provide. Topics covered will include pump-probe protein dynamics, in-situ chemical snapshot diffraction at room temperature, protein nanocrystal growth and synthesis, single-shot imaging of cells and viruses, fast ab-initio fluctuation SAXS, reconstruction and phasing algorithms, detectors, sources and protein-beam injectors. A panel of senior biologists will outline the needs of structural biology, and suggest lines of development for this field. The workshop is co-funded by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Arizona State University, and the Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology at University of California at Davis.
These funds ($5000) were used as partial support for a 5 day conference held at Lawrence Berkeley DOE National laboratory on the topic of using the recently invented X-ray laser to obtain images of molecular machines at work. Five other organisations contributed the same amount to funding this international conference. Speakers, students and postdoctoral researchers attended from throughout the USA and from other countries. The first results from the world's first hard X-ray laser (the DOE's LCLS at SLAC, near Stanford) applied to biological problems were reported at this conference, creating an atomosphere of great intellectual excitement. One of the most distinguished scientists in the field, Prof M. Rossman, described it as an "historic watershed". Since the conference was held, a second X-ray laser has commenced operation in Japan, and two others will start soon in europe. These machines can take "snap-shot" images of the protein molecules which make up most of the material in all living creatures. The first results were reported in Nature in early 2010, where we showed that these snapshots can be obtained without introducing radiation damage - the very brief X-ray laser pulses end before any damage has time to start. In this way molecular movies can be obtained showing the motion of the atoms in molecular machines, or chemical reactions proceeding. This will be of great value to the drug industry in their efforts to find a more rational basis for drug development which relies less on trial and error.
