July 2024

It was great to see our Case Western footprinting collegues at the ASMS conference in Anaheim this year! Let us know if you are planning on going to the ACA in Denver - would love to meet up with fellow footprinters.  

June 2024

Our new LCMS is out of the crates and installed! Now we are waiting to get the official training from Thermo..... 

May 2024

Our colleague Erik Farquhar is onsite as part of the Proposal Review Board for the Foundry, and he came to visit us at the ALS. It was great to compare notes, since Erik runs our counterpart footprinting beamline at the NSLS-II synchrotron at Brookhaven National Lab. 

April 2024

We were able to run samples using the BELLA facility - a laser driven proton facility at Berkeley Lab. It was just like old times at the beamline, staying up to 2am to do experiments! A video montage of entering the BELLA "cave" to place samples in the beam is here. And a few more photos are here. 

March 2024

We are trying out a system called OxyLED, which is used to measure the amount of O2 in solutions. It will be interesting to see if/how O2 is depleted in samples under X-ray irradiation. 

Feb 2024

After many grant attempts, we finally succeeded in obtaining funding for our very own LCMS system. Here is the Exploris 480 in crates in the lab, waiting to be installed as soon as the new electrical outlets are ready.

Jan 2024

Savannah is back! She is now a Research Associate in the group, and will be helping research the FLASH effect.

Dec 2023

In trying to quantify hydroxyl radical concentration using fluorescence, we are learning that nearly everything glows in the X-ray beam. Here is the beautiful blue glow of a quartz capillary when X-rays hit it. The purple is the beam in air, presumably ionizing nitrogen and oxygen.

Nov 2023

A very warm welcome to Simruthi, the newest member of the FLASH team. She is working with our collaborators Antoine and Jamie, who have an LDRD to investigate how the dose rate of irradiation affects damage of proteins and cells. 

Oct 2023

We have completed our inline simultaneous spectroscopy-XFMS instrumentation setup at the beamline. This allows us to excite molecules immediately prior to X-ray exposure, and collect fluorescence either prior or subsequent to X-ray exposure, all while the sample is moving between the jet nozzle and the collection tube.

Sept 2023

Kyleigh did a terrific job in her lightning talk for the EFRC Hub Meeting and was just announced as one of the winners! Way to go Kyleigh! Check out the official announcement here. 

August 2023

The summer break is over, and most of our students have headed back to school, though a few will be continuing to work with us a few days a week. We did one last tour of the ALS with the students since the ring was open and we could go inside the tunnel. Here is a view of the ALS dome from nearly directly beneath it. 

July 2023

Darren Kahan, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, won an ALS doctoral scholarship - congrats Darren! He will be using footprinting to study intrinsically disordered proteins. 

June 2023

During the Foundry planned power outage, the Bio Facility (NanoBio) planned a "NanoBio University" for our students and anyone else who was interested. We covered topics in bioinformatics, and had practical sessions on using ImageJ, Chimera, Coot, and AlphaFold Colab.

June 2023

The students are back! A warm welcome back to Kyleigh, a pro in the lab now since she was here last summer, and to our new students Savannah and Ruby.

May 2023

We are heading to the ACA in July in Baltimore. Corie's abstract was selected for a talk, and she will be describing the surprising effect of dose rate on peptide modifications. Contact us if you are heading to the ACA as well and want to meet up. 

April 2023

The ALS-ENABLE group webinar is now online here. 

March 2023

The ALS structural biology beamlines which are part of the NIH P30 "ALS-ENABLE" are pleased to announce an upcoming webinar on April 10. The webinar will cover capabilities at the beamlines in macromolecular crystallography, small angle X-ray scattering, and X-ray footprinting, as well as information on how to apply for beamtime.

March 2023

Welcome Sathi! We are very pleased that Sathi Paul has joined the XFMS team as our newest postdoc.

Feb 2023

This is not exactly science, but rather commentary on the intersection of science with science fiction. If interested, check out Corie's article in the latest ACA RefleXions magazine.

Jan 2023

Registration is open for the 14th Conference on Biology and Synchrotron Radiation. It's a great conference for anyone using X-rays to study biological structures and dynamics, so if you can make the trek to Sweden this summer, considering applying here. 

Dec 2022

Just found out we got a cover image for our recent Antibodies article. 

Dec 2022

Our collaborators measuring dose at the beamline using Gafchromic film. This information will be very useful for us in designing future experiments. 

Nov 2022

We got to tour the JGI, which was very interesting! Here are a few of us from the Bio and Imaging floors at the Foundry in front of one of the interior murals at the JGI. We're hoping to collaborate with scientists at the JGI on some footprinting projects soon.

August 2022

Our student wins Poster Slam competition! Kyleigh won first place in the Berkeley Lab poster competition. She put together a terrific poster about monitoring amyloid beta aggregation.

July 2022

Introducing the next blockbuster movie - click above to see the trailer.

June 2022

Welcome students! A very warm welcome to our two undergraduate students who will be working with us this summer.

April 202

Just wanted to post a picture of my awesome team.

March 2022

The beamline 3.3.1 mirror and mask were re-positioned during the ALS shutdown and we have our full beam now - no more clipping! Click above to see a video of the first burn.

Feb 2022

We have started making video tutorials specific to using the PMI/Byos software for analyzing XFMS data.

Click here for a video on how to log in and read in your files.

Click here for an overview video of how to create dose response curves.

December 2021

Beamline  3.3.1 is online! After much hard work and anxiety, the beamline passed its Readiness Review and was brought online. Above is a picture of the kapton window which was punctured when the beam was turned on for the first time.

August 2021

Our virtual workshop at the ACA was a great success and well attended. Speakers included: Aashish Manglick, Cheryl Kerfeld, Faraz Choudhury, David Lodowski, Michael Gross, and Sarah Woodson

July 2021

At long last, the focusing mirror is in place at 3.3.1. Above is a picture of the mirror and tank being lowered into the beamline.