A revolutionary X-ray analytical technique enables researchers at a glance to identify structural similarities and differences between multiple proteins under a variety of conditions and has already been used to gain valuable new insight into a prime protein target for cancer chemotherapy.

Olfactory sensory neurons – nerve cells in the nose – directly sense molecules that convey scent, then send the signals to the brain. Biologists have long wondered how it’s possible for each nerve cell to be equipped with only one kind of olfactory receptor (OR). There are over a thousand different kinds of OR genes [...]

Berkeley Lab researchers have achieved a major advance in understanding how genetic information is transcribed from DNA to RNA by providing the first step-by-step look at the biomolecular machinery that reads the human genome.

Artificial photosynthesis and other new technologies based on
metalloenzyme catalysis will benefit from a technique for simultaneously collecting both diffraction and spectroscopy data demonstrated by Berkeley Lab and SLAC researchers at the world’s most powerful X-ray laser.

Cilia are critical to good health and a newly discovered cilia partitioning system might be the key

A cold sulfur spring in Germany is the only place where archaea are known to dominate bacteria in a microbial community. How this unique community thrives and the lessons it may hold for understanding global carbon and sulfur cycles are beginning to emerge from research at the Advanced Light Source’s Berkeley Synchrotron Infrared Structural Biology facility.

A multi-institutional team of researchers that included Berkeley Lab scientists has created the first artificial molecules whose chirality can be rapidly switched from a right-handed to a left-handed orientation with a beam of light. This holds potentially important possibilities for the application of terahertz technologies across a wide range of fields, including biomedical research, homeland security and ultrahigh-speed communications.

Using ultrafast, intensely bright pulses of X-rays from the
Linac Coherent Light Source, an international team of researchers led by scientists at Berkeley Lab and SLAC obtained the first ever images at room temperature of photosystem II, a protein complex critical for photosynthesis and future artificial photosynthetic systems.