DOE NEWS
NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: Jeff Sherwood (DOE), 202/586-5806, Marc Stern (NIH), 301/496-2535
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 21, 1999
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy (DOE) today announced a new collaboration to upgrade two of the nation's premier synchrotron X-ray facilities. The upgrades will increase the nation's ability to measure the structure of complex materials such as proteins in order to learn more about how they function.
Dr. Harold Varmus, NIH Director, and Dr. Martha Krebs, Director
of DOE's Office of Science, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding
to significantly improve the capabilities of two X-ray sources,
the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) at the Department
of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University
and the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at the Department
of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, N.Y.
This year, NIH is providing $14 million to SSRL and $4 million
to NSLS.
"By upgrading these facilities, this collaboration holds
the promise of providing dramatically improved capabilities to
determine the structure of important molecules," said Dr.
Varmus. "NIH's support is extremely timely and I believe
will prove crucial to meet the exponentially growing demand for
access to the Energy Department's world-class research facilities,"
said Dr. Krebs.
Some of the medical applications of this research include designing
new pharmaceutical drugs and understanding how protein malfunctions
can lead to disease. For example, DOE synchrotron light sources
have been used to help develop protease inhibitors used to treat
HIV infection and they have been used to understand the mutations
in an enzyme, superoxide dismutase, that have been associated
with Lou Gehrig's disease. Research applications related to one
of DOE's missions, the cleanup of its former weapons production
complex, include studies of bacteria and plants being considered
for use in bioremediation of environmental contamination.
The improvements include upgrading the electron storage ring at
SSRL to convert it into a "third generation" X-ray source
as well as providing accelerator and instrumentation upgrades
at NSLS. The accelerator upgrade at SSRL will enable the five
protein crystallography beamlines each to collect up to five times
more data in a given period and therefore determine the structure
of a particular protein or virus much more quickly. The beamline
improvements will be dedicated for protein crystallography work.
However, both synchrotron light sources are used for a wide variety
of research besides crystallography in fields such as physics,
materials science, geology, chemistry, biology, medicine, environmental
science and electrical engineering. The accelerator upgrades will
improve the overall performance of both facilities and thus will
benefit all their scientific users, including those beyond the
life sciences.
The development of powerful synchrotron X-ray sources at Department
of Energy labs in recent years has made it possible for researchers
to determine the structure of many complex materials including
the molecular structure of proteins. The brightness of these synchrotron
light source-generated X-ray beams is a billion times greater
than laboratory generators and enables scientists to see important
details not possible before.
Even with the addition in recent years of two new DOE facilities,
the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab and the Advanced
Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the demand by
protein crystallographers for use of these very bright X-ray sources
has far outstripped the availability of beamlines. As the major
supporter of basic biomedical research on proteins, NIH is responding
to this demand by helping to upgrade the country's synchrotrons
so that more experiments can be carried out. DOE's Basic Energy
Sciences Advisory Committee recommended the upgrades in a 1997
report. An interagency working group on structural biology at
synchrotrons, in a 1999 report, strongly endorsed the upgrades.
Synchrotron radiation is given off by charged particles moving
at nearly the speed of light that are bent by magnets in the storage
rings. The radiation, X-rays and ultraviolet rays in these particular
facilities, is directed into numerous beamlines where scientists
position specialized instrumentation to do their research.
More information on SSRL is available at http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/welcome.html
More information on the NSLS is available at http://www.nsls.bnl.gov
R-99-187