New Biological Facilities Extend Visualisation Capability

The Diamond Light Source facility on the Harwell Campus has been granted £15.6 million for a new imaging centre for biology that will be housed in its own building outside of the landmark silver doughnut of the Synchrotron light source.

Funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) the new centre will join one of Diamond’s Phase III beamlines – the X-ray nanoprobe - providing scientists with powerful cryo-electron microscopes to progress studies of molecular make-up and provision of new tools to visualise single bio-molecules.

This new centre will offer the imaging approaches of single particle analysis of biological macromolecules and cellular tomography, as well as electron crystallography. These techniques will complement the atomic mapping possible with macromolecular crystallography beamlines, the elemental mapping in cells provided by the X-ray nanoprobe and the larger scale cell imaging capability of the new Full Field Cryo Transmission X-ray Microscope (cryo-TXM).