PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

23-Sep-2014

Contact: Jeannette Spalding jeannette.spalding@case.edu 216-368-3004 Case Western Reserve University @casenews

Case Western Reserve University's synchrotron facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory is on its way to becoming the No. 1 beamline facility for biology in the world by early 2016, thanks to a jumpstart grant of $4.6 million from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

For two decades, the Case Center for Synchrotron Biosciences has developed and operated beamlines for an international community of users. These advanced instruments deliver ultra powerful x-rays that allow scientists to visualize in action the nano-scale structures of the body's molecules and proteins. Armed with these meticulous images, scientists attempt to pinpoint disease-causing vulnerabilities in the body's molecules and proteins and target those weaknesses for therapeutic intervention.

To prepare for the upgrade, the four existing beamlines of the center, located at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven laboratories in Upton, NY, will go offline Sept. 30 while construction continues on the new synchrotron light source (The NSLS-II), right next door. During the last two years, $50 million from NIH, the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy have been invested at Brookhaven to fund the construction of four new state-of-the-art beamlines at NSLS-II for the biological science user community. The recent award of $4.6 million from NIBIB to Case Western Reserve University will support the commissioning and operation of the beamlines allowing the re-start of user operations for both CWRU scientists and investigators from across the world.

"When NSLS-II opens, the lab's beamlines will have the brightest, most intense x-ray beams 100 times brighter than beamlines anywhere in the world," said Mark Chance, PhD, director of the Center for Proteomics and Bioinformatics, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. "With this technology, NSLS-II will collect data 100 times faster than any other synchrotron facility in the world."

NIBIB also welcomes the research capabilities of the new beamlines at NSLS-II.

"We look forward to this new light source coming online and giving clarity to the molecular machines that are the inner working components of cells," said Christina Liu, PhD, program director of Molecular Imaging at NIBIB.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has entered the act as well. In 2012, the NSF awarded the Case Center for Synchrotron Biosciences a $4 million grant toward building a particularly specialized beamline dedicated to footprinting. With footprinting, the beamline provides highly detailed visualization of the structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules. Macromolecules are the "machines" of the cell, and footprinting at a synchrotron beamline enables scientists to identify key moving parts of the machine at the level of single nucleotides or amino acids that make up this molecular entity. Scientists can then view how molecular structures interact and move within a solution (liquid) state, often within living cells.

The rest is here:

Case Western Reserve University on track to become no. 1 synchrotron lab in world