In the March 2009 Journal of Synchrotron Radiation special issue on radiation damage, in addition to authoring two papers, our illustrious James Holton’s ankle appears on the cover! The first paper deals with the practical aspects of controlling and understanding radiation damage and will be very interesting to crystallographers who would like to collect data more…
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The SIBYLS beamline has recently been awarded 50,000 hours on the NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center) to perform solution structure modeling using experimental SAXS data. Besides the usual ab-initio reconstructions programs a new approach in rigid body modeling BILBOMD has been parallelized on the NERSC supercomputer. It is commonly acknowledged that flexibility between domains of…
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In a recent article in the Journal of Molecular Biology a paper has been published exploring the ability of prokaryotic thermophiles to supply stable human protein homologs for structural biology. The authors have made use of an unusual deep-sea hydrothermal-vent worm called Alvinella pompejana. This worm has been found in temperatures averaging as high as…
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ADSC was very helpful in making some subtle adjustments to the detector gain maps so that the background of the images collected with our newly upgraded Q315r detector are much more uniform. Before …
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An excellent paper came out today in the Oct 3rd issue of Cell detailing structural, biochemical, and genetic studies of the Mre11-DNA complex and its role in detecting and repairing double-strand breaks in DNA. Both the SAXS and crystallography data were collected at the SIBYLS beamline. There is also a nice writeup by Paul Preuss…
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The SIBYLS beamline Kohzu monochromator has often exhibited hysteresis when moving the theta 2 motor. This manifests itself in a decaying beam and suboptimal intensity. In order to fully understand the problem it helps to have a general understanding of the motors in the monochromator. The figure below illustrates the various motors and their relative…
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In the September 19, 2008 issue of Cell, we report striking conformational rearrangements in the crystal structure of NEDD8~Cul5ctd-Rbx1 and SAXS analysis of NEDD8~Cul1ctd-Rbx1 relative to their unmodified counterparts. These results point to conformational control of Cullin-RING ligase (CRL) activity, with ligation of NEDD8 shifting equilibria to disfavor inactive closed architectures, and favor dynamic, open forms that promote polyubiquitination. Cullin-RING ligases…
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Due to DOE budget cuts and planned upgrades to the ALS storage ring we will have no light until October 11th. Hopefully we will be scheduling beamtime for Oct/Nov/Dec within the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in obtaining General Users shifts please fill out an online application.