1. FREQUENCY MAP ANALYSIS APPLIED TO ALS
by Art Robinson
(Contact: dsrobin@lbl.gov)

In collaboration with visiting scientists from the Astronomie et Systemes Dynamiques department at the French Bureau des Longitudes in Paris, accelerator physicists from the ALS have applied the technique of frequency map analysis to measurements of the electron beam in the ALS. The excellent agreement between the map based on experimental data and that obtained with calibrated numerical models leads the scientists to propose the use of the technique to improve both numerical models and the behavior of storage rings, including important parameters such as lifetime and injection efficiency.

Read the full story at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/science/sci_archive/freqmap.html.

Publication about this research: D. Robin, C. Steier, J. Laskar, L. Nadolski, "Global Dynamics of the Advanced Light Source Revealed through Experimental Frequency Map Analysis," Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 558 (2000).

2. NEW BERKELEY STRUCTURAL GENOMICS CENTER FUNDED
by Art Robinson
(Contact: KHBalder-Froid@lbl.gov)

The new Berkeley Structural Genomics Center headed by Sung-Hou Kim of Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division and the University of California, Berkeley, got some good news on September 26. On that day, the National Institute for General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), one of the institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced new awards totaling $150 million over five years to seven multi-institutional consortia, including Kim's, established to develop speedier techniques for solving protein structures. The NIGMS Protein Structure Initiative comprises two stages, a five-year pilot phase involving the seven consortia and a follow-on five-year production phase with the goal of accumulating 10,000 protein structures by the end of the tenth year. To reach this target, the award recipients will be developing ways to enhance the throughput of every phase of protein-structure determination from crystal growing, to screening for good crystals, to data collection, to data analysis. Kim's project, the Berkeley Structural Genomics Center, will focus on two bacteria with extremely small genomes to study protein structure and infer protein function where it is not known.

Current and future x-ray crystallography beamlines at the ALS will play a major role in the NIGMS program under another recently chartered center in the Physical Biosciences Division, the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB), which has overall responsibility for operation of crystallography beamlines. The Berkeley Structural Genomics Center, in particular, will make extensive use of these beamlines. Two other consortia also plan to do some of their work at the ALS: the Joint Center for Structural Genomics headed by Ian Wilson of the Scripps Research Institute and the TB Structural Genomics Consortium led by Thomas Terwilliger of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Automation and robotics will figure prominently in the NIGMS program. For example, preliminary collaboration between the BSCB and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, which is a member of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics, has already begun with the aim of ensuring that hardware and software for automation is compatible.

Why all the interest in protein structures? To build on the success of gene sequencing programs, such as the Human Genome Project, scientists must translate the immense catalog of gene sequences into useful information, a task that requires knowing the functions of the proteins that are the result of gene expression in humans and other organisms. One way to obtain this information is to use techniques like x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance to determine the protein structure, since function depends on structural features, such as grooves and pockets on the protein surface. While there are too many distinct proteins (perhaps 100,000 in humans alone) to solve all their structures, it is hoped that by grouping proteins into families based on their gene sequences and solving structures for representative proteins, it may be possible to predict the functions of other proteins from their sequences. In particular, Kim and others have championed the view that there are a smaller number of characteristic "folds" in protein structures that are the basic building structural blocks associated with specific functions and can be identified and categorized. Even this approach, however, won't work without vastly faster ways to determine structures.

3. BEAMLINE 5.3.2 DELIVERS FIRST LIGHT
(Contact: warwick@lbl.gov)

(Editor's note: This article was modified on 10/6/00.) A new bend-magnet beamline for polymer NEXAFS spectromicroscopy at the ALS saw photons for the first time on September 26. The beamline will provide a dedicated facility for the study of the heterogeneous organic chemistry of composite materials on a spatial scale of tens of nanometers, to be operated by a participating research team (PRT) led by Harald Ade of North Carolina State University (NCSU). The high brightness of the ALS bend magnet promises to deliver enough photons into the diffraction-limited acceptance of a zone-plate scanning microscope to allow transmission imaging and NEXAFS spectromicroscopy at a MHz count rate and at a spectral resolution of 1 part in 3000. Ade, Tony Warwick (ALS), and Howard Padmore (ALS) have collaborated on a simple spherical grating monochromator design that exploits the small acceptance of the zone plate and operates at low dispersion to cover the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen 1s edges. A single spherical grating rotates in front of a fixed exit slit aperture, which is the illumination source for the microscope. The microscope itself is also a new development, with a collaboration primarily between the ALS, NCSU, and McMaster University resulting in a new STXM design that uses interferometric encoding to neutralize vibrations, thermal drift, and mechanical imperfections.

Beamline commissioning is expected to take a few weeks, followed by the commissioning of the microscope through the end of the year. Beamline engineering was headed by Mike Kritscher (Berkeley Lab). Participating most actively in microscope development are Warwick and Keith Franck (ALS); Ade, David Kilcoyne, and Konstantin Kaznacheyev (NCSU); Rick Steele, George Meigs, Sirine Fakra, Adam Hitchcock, and Peter Hitchcock (McMaster); and Tolek Tyliszczak (McMaster). Funding was provided by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation through NCSU and by The Dow Chemical Company, with the beamline provided by the DOE through the ALS.

4. USERS' MEETING ADVANCE REGISTRATION CLOSES ON OCTOBER 6
(Contact: alsum2000@lbl.gov)

Are you planning to attend one of the seven specialized workshops being held as part of this year's ALS Users' Meeting? If so, please note that registration for the Users' Meeting is required in order to participate in the workshops. Time is running out, but it's not too late to reserve your spot: the advance registration deadline has been extended to this Friday, October 6. Online registration is quick and easy; if you have not yet done so, go to http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usermtg/registration.html to submit your advance registration over the Web. The latest information about the Users' Meeting, including updates about workshops, transportation, and program changes, is available at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usermtg. Register today!

5. SSRL WORKSHOP ON NANOSCALE DYNAMICS
(Contact: kevan@oregon.uoregon.edu)

A workshop on using coherent soft x-ray beams to probe nanoscale dynamics will be held at the Training Center of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center on October 18. The workshop, titled "Soft X-Ray Speckles: Nanoscale Dynamics in Liquids and Solids," is being hosted by the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) as part of its annual Users' Meeting. The preliminary workshop program can be found at http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/conferences/ssrl27/speckles-program.html. If you are interested in giving a presentation at the workshop, please submit a short abstract to Jan Luning at luning@stanford.edu. For further information, please contact Jan Luning or Steve Kevan (kevan@oregon.uoregon.edu).

6. MACROMOLECULAR CRYSTALLOGRAPHY PROPOSALS DUE NOVEMBER 1
(Contact: alsproposals@lbl.gov)

The User Services Office is accepting proposals from scientists who wish to conduct research as independent investigators at the Macromolecular Crystallography Facility (Beamline 5.0.2) between April and December 2001. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2000. Scientists wishing to renew a previous proposal must notify the ALS User Services Office Manager, Bernie Dixon, at alsproposals@lbl.gov. The following resources are available for further information:

ALS User Services Administrator

alsuser@lbl.gov

Independent-investigator process and PDF proposal form

http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/quickguide/independinvest.html

Beamline 5.0.2 information

http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/als_users_bl/5.0-Datasheet.pdf

http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/quickguide/bl5.0.2.html

Macromolecular Crystallography Facility Web site

http://www.lbl.gov/LBL-Programs/mcf

7. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS

Following are some of the experimenters who will be collecting data during the next two weeks at the ALS.

Beamline 1.4.3
Phil Huie (Stanford Univ. Medical Center)
Hoi-Ying Holman (Berkeley Lab)
Ted Raab (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder)
Mary Kauffman (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory)
T.J. Wilkinson and Dale Perry (Berkeley Lab)
Sherry Zhang and Phil Ross (Berkeley Lab)
Harvey Doner (Univ. of California, Berkeley)

Beamline 5.0.2
Barry Stoddard (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)
Axel Brunger (Stanford Univ.)
Peter Hwang (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Will Somers (Genetics Institute)
Keith Wilson (Vertex Pharmaceuticals)
Stewart Turley (Univ. of Washington)
Ray Stevens (The Scripps Research Institute)
Sung-Hou Kim (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 7.3.1.1
Harald Ade (North Carolina State Univ.)
Simone Anders (IBM Almaden Research Center)

Beamline 8.0.1
Tom Callcott (Univ. of Tennessee)
Dave Ederer (Tulane Univ.)
Lou Terminello (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Nobuyoshi Yamada (Univ. of Electrocommunications, Japan)

Beamline 9.3.2
Peggy Hou (Berkeley Lab)

8. OPERATIONS UPDATE
(Contact: Lampo@lbl.gov)

For the user runs of September 13 - 18, September 19 - 24, and September 26 - October 1, the beam availability was 94%. Of the delivered beam, 82% was delivered to completion without interruption. There were no significant outages.

Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web (http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/accelinfo.html). Requests for special operations use of the "scrubbing" shift should be sent to Bruce Samuelson (BCSamuelson@lbl.gov, x4738) by 1:00 p.m. Friday. The Accelerator Status Hotline at (510) 486-6766 (ext. 6766 from Lab phones) features a recorded message giving up-to-date information on the operational status of the accelerator.