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Since the Stone Age humans have been adept at selecting materials for specific tasks based on the material’s properties. With the discovery of smelting man learned to manipulate materials to improve performance. Now new materials can be “built” on a nm scale with properties that are required for a host of applications, from solar cells to catalysts in industrial process.
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The self-assembly of peptides into fibrils is commonly observed. Such fibrils may have biological roles and may also be useful in nanotechnology applications, as scaffolds to create metal nanowires or to template the self-assembly of other inorganic materials, for biosensors or as supports for cell adhesion. The misfolding of proteins into so-called amyloid fibrils is also implicated in amyloid diseases such as Alzheimer’s and type II diabetes. It has been suggested that amyloid fibrils are ...
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Hydrogen is difficult to store or transport with current technology. Hydrogen gas has good energy density by weight, but poor energy density by volume compared to the hydrocarbons used currently to power cars. In principle, hydrogen requires a larger tank than petrol to store the same energy, making it a less practical alternative in volumetric terms. One approach to improve the energy density of gaseous hydrogen is by storing the gas at higher pressures. This requires material and design ...
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Many nanotechnology and biotechnology applications rely on how tiny metal particles arrange themselves on flat surfaces. These patterned structures on the nanometre scale are of great importance in making novel electronic, magnetic and photonic devices. Therefore being able to accurately characterise them is vital. However, this can be very challenging and sometimes requires several different techniques to find the detailed shape and chemical composition of the nanoparticles. A group of ...
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Understanding the deformation of polycrystalline structural materials is the key to improving performance and reliability of complex engineering components and systems. The interaction between grains in the metal and how they behave under stress is vital to determining the strength of a component and how it will deform. However capturing full details of polycrystalline deformation is a significant challenge, partly because of the sheer volume of information involved, and partly due to the ...
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Transition metal oxides are an intriguing class of materials since it is possible to drastically modify their properties by changing their temperature, applying a magnetic field or simply by irradiating them with light. Of particular interest are the manganites that exhibit complex interactions bewteen the spin and and orbital degrees of freedom. To fully understand the nature of this delicate balance between the different phases of the same material it is crucial to exploit the versatility ...
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The impact earthquakes have on the planet’s surface is well documented. However, much less is known about what happens deep in the planet’s interior. An international group of researchers have been using the Extreme Conditions beamline at Diamond Light Source to study the mineral ferropericlase, thought to be the second most abundant mineral in the Earth’s lower mantle, over 300 miles (670 km) below the surface of the planet. Understanding what happens to ferropericlase in the high ...
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Researchers at Newcastle University’s Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences are regular users of Diamond’s MX beamlines. One of the complications of crystallography is that part of the information required to determine structures is lost in the diffraction experiment. This information can be inferred in special circumstances in a ‘SAD’ (single-wavelength anomalous dispersion) experiment. In common with other MX users, the Newcastle group have been utilising these SAD experiments to ...
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Before we are born, each and every one of us is enveloped by membranes and fluid that ensure our safe development and protect us from the external environment at a time when we are at our most vulnerable. Foetal membranes are split into two layers and the protective sac, the amniotic membrane that surrounds the developing baby, is currently the focus
of studies being carried out by researchers from the University of Reading’s School of Pharmacy and the Institute for Women’s Health at ...
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Extending our knowledge of how magnetic materials behave on an atomic scale has led to considerable technological advances, particularly in the area of information storage. Scientists have been using the Nanoscience beamline at Diamond to study the properties of magnetic domain walls, the boundary between areas of material with uniform magnetization. The group has modeled the way that these walls move when current is applied, a technique which has promising applications in writing data in ...
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Scientists have been using both Diamond Light Source and the ISIS neutron source to get a better understanding of an important group of materials that can help target the delivery of drugs to the right place in the body. The materials, called Pluronics™, form water-based gels which can be customized to control their structure and how they flow, important considerations in controlling how and when the drugs become active.
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Highly anisotropic graphene materials such as aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) forests, oriented CNTs arrays have been universally considered as an excellent electrode for electroanalysis because they make predominant use of the highly reactive edge planes in contrast to the nearly inert basal planes. However most aligned CNTs contain metal catalysts, which are also a possible source of their electrocatalytic activity. Therefore the extent to which the electrocatalytic properties are affected ...
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Bacteria that develop resistance to drugs can cause great problems in the treatment of infections and diseases. Multi-drug resistance bacteria pump the drugs out of their cells through membrane proteins known as transporters. To reveal the structure of these proteins and understand their mechanism it is necessary to isolate the proteins, grow crystals and collect data at powerful X-ray sources. An early success at Diamond Light Source has been achieved with crystals of the multidrug efflux ...
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It’s a stressful life for bacteria. Bacillus subtilis commonly lives in soil, where it’s under daily attack from heat, acid and salts in the soil. Scientists have been using Diamond to understand how the bacterial cells respond quickly to rapidly changing environments to survive. This research has been published in the journal Science.
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The p53 gene is a tumour suppressor gene, in other words its activity stops the formation of tumours. It is therefore a key protein in the cell’s defence against cancer. Mutations in p53 are found in most tumour types, and so contribute to the complex network of molecular events leading to tumour formation. This tumour suppressor is in fact mutationally inactivated in around 50% of human cancers. Approximately onethird of the mutations lower the melting temperature of the protein, leading to ...
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Membrane proteins are essential for many biological processes in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. In the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli), a protein called YaeT selects and folds other proteins before inserting them into the outer membrane of the cell. Tim Knowles and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham have been using Diamond Light Source to study protein solution structures in order to understand the processes by which they are targeted in the cell, and how they ...
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Liquid crystals are a state of matter that possesses some properties of liquids and some of solids. Their use in display screens is familiar, where the optical properties of the substance change in response to applied electric field. However, liquid crystals can form a wide range of very complex phases, and scientists have been using Diamond to study perhaps the most complex liquid crystal structure so far observed. This work has been published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.
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All living things propagate through the process of cell division. Histone proteins play a vital role in this complex process, but the exact molecular mechanisms that make it possible are not well understood. Histones act as spools for DNA, allowing it to wind around them to make compact packages that fit neatly into cells. Scientists from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, have been studying how histones interact with a chaperone protein to answer the ...
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Shigella flexneri is a bacterium which causes dysentery, resulting in a million deaths worldwide every year. To infect humans, it uses a complex molecular machine which attaches itself to a host cell and uses a needle to pierce the cell membrane and deliver proteins that hijack cellular processes to facilitate infection. Scientists from the University of Oxford have been using Diamond to study how the machine identifies a host cell and triggers the transfer of proteins. This work is ...
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DNA is constantly under attack. Within the human body there is an army of proteins which can detect when DNA has been damaged and attempt to repair it. One such protein is Helicase XPD.
