ALSNews Vol. 232, October 15, 2003
ALSNews is a biweekly electronic newsletter to keep users and other interested parties informed about developments at the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. To be placed on the mailing list, send your name and complete internet address to ALSNews@lbl.gov. We welcome suggestions for topics and content.
Previous Issues are available.
Table of Contents
- Users' Meeting Features ALS 10th Anniversary Celebration
- Nobel-Winning Work Supported by ALS Research
- UEC Corner: Notes from the Users' Executive Committee
- Who's in Town: A Sampling of ALS Users
- Operations Update
1. USERS' MEETING FEATURES ALS 10TH ANNIVERSARY
CELEBRATION
by Art Robinson
(Contact: doudna@uclink.berkeley.edu)
The ALS saw first light on October 5, 1993, not quite to the day but close to 10 years before this year's annual ALS Users' Association Meeting, held October 6 - 8. No one among the 289 registered attendees sang "Happy Birthday to You," but there were slides with birthday cakes in the presentations by ALS Director Daniel Chemla and DOE Associate Director of Basic Energy Sciences Patricia Dehmer. Fittingly, the proceedings included retrospectives from two of the key players in the early history of the ALS, David Attwood and Jay Marx, a display of photographs chronicling its construction and commissioning, and a dedication of the main ALS conference room to the late Klaus Halbach, inventor of the permanent-magnet insertion devices that in part motivated building the ALS and other third-generation synchrotron light sources optimized for high brightness.
Ruth Halbach reads the citation for the 2003 Halbach Award at the banquet Tuesday evening as Eli Rotenberg, Ross Schlueter, Gerry McDermott, Ben Feinberg, and Jennifer Doudna look on.
Berkeley Lab Director Charles Shank welcomed attendees with a spirited endorsement of the plans for an ALS performance upgrade that would keep the facility at the forefront of the field for the next two decades. Chemla presented a report on past accomplishments and future plans, including a look at the kinds of science to come. Featured prominently in his description, the proposed upgrade would increase the ALS brightness in a phased, four-year project covering the storage ring, insertion devices, and beamlines. After casting a brief glimpse back at the history of third-generation synchrotron facilities in the U.S., Dehmer turned her attention to the 20-year DOE roadmap now under development for facilities and noted that one of the highest recommendations of the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) was for "Light Source Facilities Upgrades."
The remainder of the morning was devoted to a Town Meeting. ALS Deputy for Operations Ben Feinberg emphasized safety, including a new effort to clean up the increasingly busy experiment hall floor, and summarized plans for a new user building, to be completed by early 2008. Accelerator Physics Group Leader David Robin reviewed the ingredients in the accelerator portion of the ALS upgrade, primarily quasi-continuous injection (top-off) at 1.9 GeV and a higher beam current. ALS Deputy for Science Neville Smith noted that determining the complement of advanced insertion devices and application-specific beamlines for the upgrade could not be done without user input. ALS User Services Group Leader Gary Krebs briefly reviewed the hopeful status of a proposed on-site user housing facility (user hostel). Finally, outgoing Users' Executive Committee chair Jennifer Doudna (Univ. of California, Berkeley) encouraged users to participate in a letter-writing campaign to influence pending legislation that could increase funding for synchrotron facilities and science.
Science highlights, highlights from young researchers, and posters constituted the meat of the program on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning, while six workshops (two held at SSRL) took over Tuesday afternoon and all day Wednesday (see the meeting program at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usermtg/ for details). Generous support from equipment vendors underwrote refreshments during the receptions at the end of the first two days.
After a buffet dinner on Tuesday evening, user meeting co-chairs Eli Rotenberg (ALS) and Gerry McDermott (Berkeley Lab) presented awards. The student poster competition was won by Tonio Buonassisi (Univ. of California, Berkeley) for a study of copper contaminants in polycrystalline silicon solar cell material. The Tim Renner User Services Award went to Donna Hamamoto (ALS Beamline Coordination). Xing-Jiang Zhou (Stanford Univ. and Berkeley Lab) took home the David A. Shirley Award for Outstanding Science for his angle-resolved photoemission studies of high-temperature superconductors. And Ruth Halbach presented the Klaus Halbach Award for Instrumentation Development to Mark Le Gros (Berkeley Lab) for developing an automated tomography station for x-ray microscopy of biological materials.
2. NOBEL-WINNING WORK SUPPORTED BY ALS RESEARCH
(Contact: TNEarnest@lbl.gov)
The recently announced 2003 Nobel Prize for Chemistry recognizes two scientists for "discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes." One of the co-recipients, Roderick MacKinnon, was cited "for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels" involving protein crystallography work performed at several synchrotron light sources. MacKinnon, a professor at Rockefeller University in New York and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), primarily works at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) in Brookhaven, NY, and the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) in Ithaca, NY. He is also a registered user of the ALS and the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology, having done work at Beamline 5.0.2 and, more recently, working at the HHMI-funded Beamline 8.2.2. Two ion-channel articles by MacKinnon's group acknowledge synchrotron support from the ALS: "Crystal structure and mechanism of calcium-gated potassium channel" [Jiang et al., Nature 417, 515 (2002)] and "The open pore conformation of potassium channels" [Jiang et al., Nature 417, 523 (2002)].
The other co-recipient, Peter Agre of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was cited "for the discovery of water channels," a membrane protein he called aquaporin (AQP1), in 1992. In 2000 and 2001, the first high-resolution three-dimensional structures of AQP1 and a related glycerol-selective bacterial channel protein (GlpF) were reported. Two of the structure papers cited in the advanced information prepared by the Nobel Foundation involved work done at ALS Beamline 5.0.2: "Structure of a glycerol-conducting channel and the basis for its selectivity" [Fu et al., Science 290, 481 (2000)] and "Structural basis of water-specific transport through the AQP1 water channel" [Sui et al., Nature 414, 872 (2001)]. ALS highlights of these research papers can be found at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/science/sci_archive/glycerol.html and http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/science/sci_archive/54aquaporin.html, respectively. According to the Nobel Foundation Web site, "This year's Prize illustrates how contemporary biochemistry reaches down to the atomic level in its quest to understand the fundamental processes of life."
3. UEC CORNER: NOTES FROM THE USERS' EXECUTIVE
COMMITTEE
by Jennifer Doudna
(Contact: doudna@uclink.berkeley.edu)
Congratulations and many thanks to Gerry McDermott, Eli Rotenberg, and the ALS staff for organizing a fantastic Users' Meeting! Last week's meeting featured many excellent talks and posters, several popular workshops, and of course the banquet and ALS awards ceremony at which this year's winners were honored. Read the meeting summary by Art Robinson for a full recap of the meeting's highlights.
As we discussed at the meeting, ALS users from the U.S. are encouraged to send letters in support of DOE funding to their congressional reps. All U.S. users were sent an email last week with detailed information about how to quickly prepare and send the letters. The UEC encourages everyone to participate and help raise the level of awareness of synchrotron research and funding in Washington.
As the year winds down, the UEC is once again seeking to elect new members to replace those of us who will rotate off the committee (Doudna and McDermott). Six nominees have agreed to run for election to the three slots we need to fill:
Clemens Heske (Univ. Wurzberg, Germany)
Jeffrey Kortright (Berkeley Lab)
Ronald Phaneuf (Univ. of Nevada, Reno)
Corie Ralston (Berkeley Lab)
Edwin Westbrook (Molecular Biology Consortium)
Wanli Yang (Berkeley Lab)
The voting deadline has been extended by one week to enable all users to familiarize themselves with the candidates. Please vote between October 21 and November 21 by going online to http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/uec/vote/ and clicking on "Vote." Thanks to all of you, and as always, please bring your concerns and comments about the ALS to your UEC.
4. 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
Hoi-Ying Holman (Berkeley Lab)
John Bradley (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Ted Raab (Carnegie Institution of Washington)
Beamline 4.0.2
Jeffrey Kortright (Berkeley Lab)
Boris Sinkovic (Univ. of Connecticut)
James Tobin (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Kai Liu (Univ. of California, Davis)
Beamlines 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3
Jiandong Zhang, Joseph Kim, Rashid Syed (Amgen)
James Griffith, Marc Jacobs (Vertex Pharmaceuticals)
Wenqin Xu, Ye Zhu (Univ. of Washington)
Gyorgy Snell (Syrrx, Inc.)
Beamline 5.3.2
Gary Mitchell (The Dow Chemical Company)
Harald Ade (North Carolina State Univ.)
Adam Hitchcock (McMaster Univ., Canada)
Beamline 6.3.1
Hisanobu Wakita (Fukuoka Univ., Japan)
Maurizio Sacchi (Univ. Paris-Sud, France)
Beamline 7.0.1
James Allen (Univ. of Michigan)
M. Zahid Hasan (Princeton Univ.)
James Tobin (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Byron Freelon (Berkeley Lab)
Joseph Nordgren (Uppsala Univ., Sweden)
Beamline 7.3.1.1
Stephen Urquhart (Univ. of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Jo Stohr (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)
Beamline 7.3.3
Alain Manceau (Univ. Joseph Fourier, France)
Beamline 8.0.1
Eberhard Umbach (Univ. Wurzburg, Germany)
Manfred Neumann (Univ. of Osnabruck, Germany)
Karsten Kuepper (Univ. of Osnabruck, Germany)
Beamlines 8.2.1, 8.2.2
Hector Aldaz, Brian Kelch (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Christopher Garcia, Alex Bankovich, Erin Adams (Stanford Univ.)
Joseph Mougous (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Ashley Deacon, Jessica Chin, Inna Leim, Irimpan Mathews, Qingping Xu
(Joint Center for Structural Genomics)
Beamline 8.3.1
Adrian Keating-Clay (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Peter Hwang (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
William Harries, Shahram Khademi (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Brian Chapados (The Scripps Research Institute)
Graeme Card, Abhinav Kumar (Plexxicon, Inc.)
Jamie Cate (Berkeley Lab)
Beamline 9.0.1
Chris Jacobsen (Stony Brook Univ.)
Beamline 9.3.2
Frank Ogletree (Berkeley Lab)
Allen Johnson (Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas)
Beamline 10.0.1
Laurent Duda (Uppsala Univ., Sweden)
Z.X. Shen (Stanford Univ.)
James Allen (Univ. of Michigan)
Nora Berrah (Western Michigan Univ.)
5. OPERATIONS UPDATE
(Contact: Lampo@lbl.gov)
For the user runs of September 30 - October 5 and October 8 - 13, the beam reliability (time delivered/time scheduled) was 92%. Of the scheduled beam, 87% was delivered to completion without interruption. The majority of lost time is attributable to several power supply problems and their repair.
Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web (http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/schedules/index.html). Requests for special operations use of the "scrubbing" shift should be sent to Bruce Samuelson (ALS-CR@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. A Web page showing the ring status in real time can be found at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/status/.
ALSNews is a biweekly electronic newsletter to keep users informed about developments at the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility located at Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. To be placed on the mailing list, send your email address to ALSNews@lbl.gov. We welcome suggestions for topics and content. Submissions are due the Friday before the issue date.
LBNL/PUB-875
Editors: lstamura@lbl.gov, alrobinson@lbl.gov, amgreiner@lbl.gov
This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098.