Celebrating Success and Looking Forward in Challenging Times ALS Director Roger Falcone took some time recently to reflect on the scientific and engineering accomplishments at the ALS while facing up to some of the challenges of the coming year. A difficult fiscal environment that features significant cuts in national scientific funding means that the ALSRead More Read more »
ALSNews Vol. 348
The Molecular Ingenuity of a Unique Fish Scale ALS research has shown how the scales of a freshwater fish found in the Amazon Basin can literally reorient themselves in real time to resist force, in essence creating an adaptable body armor. Read more… Contact: Robert O. Ritchie Ring Leader: Musa Ahmed, Chemical Sciences Division InRead More Read more »
ALSNews Vol. 347
2013 ALS User Meeting Highlights More than 400 users and staff attended this year’s User Meeting, which kicked off Monday, October 7, with a welcome from Users’ Executive Committee Chair Corie Ralston and Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos. Attendees enjoyed a full program of keynote speakers, science highlights, workshops, a historical overview, facility updates, aRead More Read more »
ALSNews Vol. 346
Countdown to 2013 ALS User Meeting: October 7-9 There is still time to register online for this year’s ALS User Meeting. With 4 keynote talks [James Murphy (DOE), Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley), James Krupnick (LBNL), and Jamie Cate (UC Berkeley)], 6 science highlights, 13 workshops, and 27 exhibitors, we are breaking all sorts of meeting records.Read More Read more »
New Light on a Famous Insulator: Photoinduced Polaronic Conduction in Anatase
Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), researchers have shown that the number of conduction electrons in anatase, as well as their degree of correlation, can be patterned by exposure to UV light in a controllable and reversible way. Read more »
ALSNews Vol. 345
A Spintronic Semiconductor with Selectable Charge Carriers Researchers found a semiconductor with two properties crucial for spintronics: a large Rashba effect (splitting of degenerate spin states) and ambipolarity (conduction via electrons and holes). Furthermore, it is possible to control whether the charge carriers are electrons or holes by engineering the surface layer. Read more… Contact: LucaRead More Read more »
Self-Assembly of “S-Bilayers”, a Step Toward Expanding the Dimensionality of S-Layer Assemblies
Protein-based assemblies with ordered nanometer-scale features in three dimensions are of interest as functional nanomaterials but are difficult to generate. Here we report that a truncated S-layer protein assembles into stable bilayers, which we characterized using cryogenic-electron microscopy, tomography, and X-ray spectroscopy. Read more »
Ring Leader: Elke Arenholz, Senior Scientist, Scientific Support Group
Senior scientist Elke Arenholz has seen a lot of changes at Beamlines 4.0.2 and 6.3.1 since she arrived at the ALS in 2000, but what brought her here initially is still what keeps her passionate about her work–designing new instrumentation and working with the user community to optimize research capabilities. Read more »
Snapshots of Ribozyme Reaction States Reveal Structural Switch
RNA, like protein, can sometimes function as an enzyme (ribozyme) to speed biochemical reaction rates. But how does RNA, a simple polymer, enhance reaction rates by at least a million fold? Researchers obtained the structures of a ribozyme trapped in different states of its catalytic cycle, showing how a change in the RNA conformation governs the reaction mechanism. Read more »
The Path of Messenger RNA through the Ribosome
Using x-ray crystallography, researchers directly observed the path of mRNA in the 70S ribosome in Fourier difference maps at 7 Å resolution. Image depicts the view down the crystallographic 4-fold axis of the 70S ribosome-mRNA-tRNA complex, showing the head-to-tail juxtaposition of the model mRNAs (red-orange) between adjacent ribosomes. Read more »