SLAC Today is available online at:
http://today.slac.stanford.edu

In this issue:
Transition in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer
Strong Partners for Future Research
Colloquium Today: First Bio-Imaging Results from LCLS

SLAC Today

Monday - June 7, 2010

(Photo - Susan Calandra)
SLAC CFO Susan Calandra. (Photo by Brad Plummer.)

Transition in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer

As announced when she began her year-long interim assignment at the lab, SLAC Chief Financial Officer Susan Calandra will soon return to Stanford service on the main campus. Her last official day as chief financial officer will be June 15.

I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge Susan's contributions to SLAC as both a leader and service provider. And Susan will not be travelling far—in either distance or her connection to SLAC. Susan is a member of the Stanford Board of Overseers Finance and Audit Committee, thus her close and ongoing involvement with SLAC will continue over the longer term. The lab's executive managers both appreciate what Susan has done for SLAC as CFO and look forward to this ongoing relationship as well.

On a closely related note, Tana Hutchison has agreed to serve as interim CFO during the CFO search process. Given that Tana has been serving as deputy CFO, we can guarantee that this transition will be seamless. Let me express SLAC's appreciation to Tana in advance.

Finally, let me note that the search for a new SLAC CFO is in progress. I understand the applicant pool is encouraging and we look forward to the successful conclusion of this process.

From left: Persis Drell (SLAC), Helmut Dosch (DESY), Dieter Lenzen (University of Hamburg), Martin Stratmann (MPG). (Photo: DESY.)

Strong Partners for Future Research

At DESY in Hamburg, Germany, on the day of the research centre's official 50th-anniversay ceremony, the course was also set for the future: four high-ranking research organizations—DESY, Stanford University with the SLAC National Accelerator Center, the University of Hamburg and the Max Planck Society—signed a memorandum of understanding on the collaboration in two promising research areas: X-ray science and free-electron laser research. 

Read more from DESY...

Colloquium Today:
First Bio-Imaging Results from LCLS

(Image - SLAC Colloquium banner)

Today at 4:15 p.m. in Panofsky Auditorium, researcher Henry Chapman from the DESY physics lab in Hamburg, Germany, will discuss the first bio-imaging results from the Linac Coherent Light Source.

The ultrafast pulses from X-ray free-electron lasers are of high enough intensity and sufficiently short duration that individual single-shot diffraction patterns can be obtained from a sample before significant damage occurs. This "diffraction before destruction" method may enable the determination of structures of proteins that cannot be grown into large enough crystals or are too radiation sensitive for high-resolution crystallography.

In order to address the many challenges of attempting molecular diffraction, Chapman and colleagues have carried out experiments in coherent diffraction from membrane protein nanocrystals at the LCLS. The periodicity of these objects provides high-angle scattering signals in order to determine the effects of pulse duration and fluence on the high-resolution structure of single objects. The crystals are filtered to sizes less than 2 micron, and are delivered to the pulsed X-ray beam in a liquid jet. Snapshot diffraction patterns were recorded from individual crystals as small as 300 nm. It was possible to record millions of diffraction patterns, and the team is assembling these data into 3-D patterns for structure determination.

This new form of protein nanocrystallography may open a new avenue for high-throughput membrane protein crystallography. These experiments were carried out as part of a large international collaboration between CFEL, ASU, the PULSE Institute at SLAC, LCLS, University of Uppsala, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and others, using the CAMP apparatus which was designed and built by the Max Planck Advanced Study Group at CFEL. 

The colloquium is free and open to the public.

Events

Access (see all)

Announcements
(see all | submit)

 Lab Announcements

Community Bulletin Board

Training ((see all | register)

Lab Training

Upcoming Workshops & Classes

News (submit)


dividing line
(Office of Science/U.S. DOE Logo) <% Response.AddHeader "Last-modified", getArticleDate() 'Response.AddHeader "Last-modified","Mon, 01 Sep 1997 01:03:33 GMT" 'Monday, December 06, 2010 %>

View online at http://today.slac.stanford.edu/.