The Baton
Today, a range of sophisticated experiments using neutrons is uncovering how life works at the deepest level. However, this requires increasingly advanced instruments and – most importantly – selectively tailored beams. The generation of neutron beams is possible only at costly and technologically demanding large-scale facilities that are increasingly developed as international collaborations, like the ESS.
Neutrons and life science
CEO Colin Carlile at The ESS Industry Day in Copenhagen 2010
our budget and we want to have delivered on specification. And of course the finishing line is but the beginning for ESS. The long period of delivering scientific output from ESS will begin. I look forward to that time when perhaps I will be observing this success from the grandstand. I will have passed on the baton. But I don’t intend to be observing from my armchair. It will be too early for that.
Neutrons provide valuable tools for life science, since they offer crucial advantages for studying complex biological structures and processes under non-damaging conditions that are as close as possible to those inside a living organism. They can easily distinguish all the elements relevant to life - carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, and are also uniquely sensitive to hydrogen isotopes, so that substituting hydrogen with deuterium in components of a biomolecular assembly highlights those structures for study. Equally, neutrons can elucidate the crucial role of water molecules and hydrogen atoms in biological processes.
Why do we need the ESS? Currently, Europe has two major international neutron facilities – the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France and ISIS near Oxford in the UK. Although
A tool for advanced science ESS will be built in the middle of the dynamic and internationally competitive Medicon Valley. This is the natural place to be for a research facility that will be world-leading in its kind, and also particularly suited for advanced analysis of organic samples. But what will the ESS mean to Medicon Valley? Before answering that question, I would like to place the ESS in its scientific setting. In recent years, advances in scientific analysis have led to considerable progress in improving human health, particularly in understanding the causes of disease at the molecular level. Of key importance has been the development of analytical techniques that enable scientists to ‘see’ deep inside biological materials, down to the scale of atoms. One of these techniques is neutron scattering, that is done at neutron sources such as the ESS. Intense beams of particles, such as neutrons, can reveal the arrangement of atoms in complex biological molecules including proteins. When neutrons are scattered off an array of biomolecules, they pinpoint the spatial positions of the atoms to give a threedimensional structure of the molecular assembly. Measuring the accompanying changes in the energy of the neutrons can even detect atomic and molecular movements. In this way, researchers can probe biological mechanisms that are the basis of life.
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