We are pleased to announce that Dr. Maxwell (Max) Watkins has recently joined BioCAT as a beamline scientist. Max got his B.S. degree in Biochemistry from Lehigh University, and his Ph.D in Chemistry from Princeton University. Much of his Ph.D. work was done at Cornell University after Prof. Nozomi Ando, his Ph.D. supervisor, moved her lab from Princeton to Cornell. His Ph.D. work involved extensive SAXS and cryo-EM studies of flexible systems. During his studies he has acquired a strong background in biochemistry and structural biology. He is extremely experienced in standard SAXS data collection and analysis techniques, including SEC-SAXS, and has used SAXS to study challenging light sensitive and anaerobic systems. Max is a great addition to the BioCAT team, and will eventually take over running most of the standard SAXS program at BioCAT. He will also be a regular participant in our SAXS coffee hours, so please drop by and say hi when you have the chance. You can find Max’s contact info on our Contact page.

Max replaces Dr. Srinivas Chakravarthy, who left BioCAT for exciting new opportunities in industry in August 2021. We are deeply appreciative of all …

Starting April 17, 2023 the APS will be down for a year to undergo a major upgrade, including rebuilding the accelerator and storage ring (“APS-U”). Following this upgrade, APS operations will restart in April 2024, though it may be several more months before all the beamlines are running again. Once completed, the new APS-U ring will provide about 100 times greater brightness than is currently available. This will provide both an increase in flux and a reduced focus size for the APS ID beamlines, including BioCAT.

BioCAT invites you to join us for a virtual town hall on March 15th to discuss the impact of APS-U on BioCAT and our user community. The purpose of this town hall is to provide an overview of the planned upgrade and its impact on, and benefits for, the BioCAT community. We also will present our plans to facilitate experiments for our users at other synchrotrons during the dark period. The town hall will consist of short presentations by BioCAT staff followed by an open-ended question and answer period. No registration is required.

BioCAT director and Illinois Institute of Technology biology and physics professor Thomas C. Irving has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Irving is being honored for “distinguished contributions to the field of muscle diffraction and enabling the fields of synchrotron fiber diffraction and biological small angle scattering.” He is among the 564 scientists, engineers, and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements in this year’s AAAS fellows class.

AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the Science family of journals. Fellows are nominated each year by current AAAS fellows and steering groups of the association’s 24 sections representing each scientific discipline.

“It’s gratifying,” Irving says of being named an AAAS fellow, which is a lifetime designation. “It acknowledges all the work I’ve done over the years, and it feels good to be recognized by my peers.”

Over the course of his career, Irving has become an international leader in the use of small-angle X-ray diffraction, which allows scientists to study molecular-level information in tissue to further understand illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases including …

BioCAT runs a SAXS coffee hour every two weeks on Mondays at 2 pm CDT. These virtual SAXS coffee hours are informal Zoom hangouts with the SAXS beamline scientists, where you can stop in and chat about whatever’s on your mind. They’re a great way to get help with your data analysis, start planning your next experiment, learn what’s new at the beamline, and more. They’re also a chance to chat with and learn from other BioCAT users. To receive announcements and the Zoom link for our coffee hour sign up for our mailing list.

BioCAT held its second MuscleX workshop May 20-May 21. This took the form of a two-day virtual symposium with 200 registrants and 149 attendees. The goal was to explore and celebrate the current state of muscle research using synchrotron radiation with 11 speakers from all over the world. There were lively discussions between the speakers and attendees in breakout rooms. Videos of most lectures will be made available on the BioCAT YouTube channel once editing is finished.

Participants and speakers at the MuscleX 2 Workshop.

BioCAT held its second MuscleX workshop course from 5/20/21-5/21/21. There were 149 remote participants and 11 speakers, consisting of 3 senior, 4 mid-career, 4 junior level researchers. The workshop was held entirely online, via BlueJeans, with a series of talk followed by general discussions in break-out sessions. The first day started with an introduction to BioCAT by Tom Irving followed by a comprehensive review of the muscle diffraction program at the BioCAT Beamline 18ID by Weikang Ma. The next talk was by Elisabetta Brunello (King’s College London) who described her studies, done at the ESRF in France, of myosin-based regulation mechanisms in rat cardiac muscle, showing among other things important …

BioCAT held its seventh intensive HOW-TO course in BioSAXS from 3/29/21-4/1/21 with 21 remote participants. There were four days of lectures and hands-on software tutorials on the basics of BioSAXS data collection and processing from expert practitioners in the field. Participants could elect to mail in samples for data collection prior to the course, and roughly half of them sent research samples and were able to analyze their own data as part of the workshop.

Participants and instructors at the Everything BioSAXS 7 Workshop.

BioCAT held its seventh BioSAXS training course from 3/29/21-4/1/21. There were 21 remote participants and 6 instructors. The workshop was held entirely online, via BlueJeans, for ~4 hours each day. Before the workshop started, participants were able to mail samples to BioCAT for SAXS data collection. This data was then sent to them, and they were able to analyze it as part of the workshop.

Day one started off with an excellent overview of the basic physics of SAXS and what kind of information you can obtain from the technique by Dr. Richard Gillilan (BioSAXS beamline, CHESS). This was followed by a talk from Dr. Jesse Hopkins …

After the left ventricle of the heart contracts, it must relax efficiently to prepare to refill and supply the body with blood on the next beat. An increasing number of patients — including nearly all patients with heart failure — suffer from impaired relaxation, which is part of a clinical syndrome known as diastolic dysfunction. Currently, treatments for impaired relaxation do not exist.

A team of Wayne State University School of Medicine researchers led by Charles Chung, Ph.D., assistant professor of physiology, recently received a $1,894,271 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to address the critical need for new drug targets and diagnostic indexes for diastolic dysfunction using novel biomechanical tests that ultimately can be translated into clinical practice.

According to Chung, the project was inspired by his research team’s finding that how quickly the heart’s muscle moves is directly related to how fast the muscle can relax. The project will use unique experiments and imaging techniques to link mechanical properties of the heart with models of heart failure that occur in patients.

“My lab’s main research focus is to understand how the heart muscle moves at …