Science Highlights

MAIL-IN/HAND-IN User Survey

We have been operating our SAXS mail-in/hand-in program for 6 months – 3 cycles of ALS proposals. The beamline and its staff are dedicated to developing and applying technologies and methodologies which combine SAXS and crystallography. Interacting with an extensive and robust external user community is a critical component of this development. Our mission for…
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Characterizing flexible macromolecules with SAXS.

Unstructured proteins, RNA or DNA components provide functionally important flexibility that is key to many macromolecular assemblies throughout cell biology. As objective, quantitative experimental measures of flexibility and disorder in solution are limited, small angle scattering (SAS), and in particular small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), provides a critical technology to assess macromolecular flexibility as well…
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Bend, Fray, Cut: A Unified Mechanism for Exo- and Endo-Nucleases

Two related manuscripts appear in the April 15 issue of CELL reporting results endo and exo nucleases important for DNA repair. Both groups of researchers made extensive use of the MX capabilities of the SIBYLS beamline to collect critical crystallographic data. The crystal structures of human flap endonuclease (FEN1) in complex with both substrate and…
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The ABC of DNA repair

Rad50 is an ABC-type ATPase that forms a complex with the nuclease Mre11 and plays an essential role in the signaling and repair of DNA damage. Now crystal structures and SAXS analyses determined here at the SIBYLS beamline, along with functional assays, reveal how Rad50 transmits information between the ATPase and Mre11-binding sites, and the…
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Small Angle X-ray Scattering (the book)

From the January edition of “[Crystallography Times](http://www.rigaku.com/newsletter.html)” from Rigaku: > Small Angle X-ray Scattering (eds. Glatter & Kratky) can be freely (and legally) [downloaded](http://physchem.kfunigraz.ac.at/sm/Service/Glatter_Kratky_SAXS_1982.zip) from the [Scattering Methods](http://physchem.kfunigraz.ac.at/sm/) program at the University of Graz. The book provides a basic introduction to SAXS, followed by detailed fundamental theoretical and experimental aspects, as well as methods for…
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Nitric Oxide Synthase is the PDB Molecule of the Month

One of our favorite molecules has been selected as the January [Molecule of the Month](http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/static.do?p=education_discussion/molecule_of_the_month/pdb133_1.html) by the RCSB Protein Data Bank.

Ku and DNA-PKcs dynamic conformations

The number one in the citation hits for SAXS-study in 2010 obtained SIBYLS collaborative work on Ku and DNA-PKcs ([Hammel et al. 2010](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19893054)). Here, Ku and DNA-PKcs solution structures alone and in complex with DNA, defined by X-ray scattering (SAXS), reveal major structural reorganizations that choreograph non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) initiation. These results show how…
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2007-2009 MX data archived

To free up space on the primary /data volume we’ve recently created compressed read-only archival filesystems (using the [squashfs](http://squashfs.sourceforge.net/) filesystem if you’re interested) for all MX and SAXS data collected at the SIBYLS beamline between 2007 and 2009. You will find the archives mounted as /2007\_data, /2008\_data, and /2009_data on most of the beamline computers.…
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