A team of leading Biological Sciences researchers at our University have become the first ever to use a new Diamond Light Source beam as part of their research into cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae) – the only known photosynthetic bacteria to produce oxygen.
Diamond Light Source, near Oxford, opened its 32nd beamline – the Versatile Macromolecular Crystallography micro/nanofocus beamline VMXm – to the Southampton group led by Dr Ivo Tews, marking the completion of phase III funding. The Tews group was selected to carry out the first experiments.
Dr Tews, Lecturer in Structural Biology and Principal Investigator (Protein interactions & cell membranes), and joint Southampton/Diamond PhD student, Rachel Bolton, have been using the state-of-the-art beamline to investigate proteins involved in nutrient uptake of photosynthetic or cyanobacteria.
Their project is embedded with work at the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton by Professor Mike Zubkov and Professor Tom Bibby to understand the efficiency of the bacterial metabolism and of nutrient uptake. They would like to understand how these phytoplankton thrive under scarce nutrient conditions.
Dr Tews is the Southampton lead for the CCP4 project (collaborative computing project 4) that has recently been awarded £2M by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to develop specific software for structural biology in crystallographic computing (in conjunction with Diamond and the Universities of Kent, Liverpool, York and the Medical Research Council Laboratory at Cambridge).
Dr Tews added:
“Developments in hardware and software go hand in hand to make crystallography easier to use for researchers. These are exciting times, as these technological advances allow us to carry out experiments that were unthinkable a couple of years back.”
You can read our full press release here.
