“This is a major step toward the goal of making a movie of the molecular machine responsible for photosynthesis, the process by which plants make the oxygen we breathe, from sunlight and water," explained John Spence, ASU Regents’ Professor of physics, team member and scientific leader of the National Science Foundation funded BioXFEL Science and Technology Center, which develops methods for biology with free electron lasers. ASU recently made a large commitment to the groundbreaking work of the femtosecond crystallography team by planning to establish a new Center for Applied Structural Discovery at the Biodesign Institute at ASU. The center will be led by Petra Fromme. Student role in research
An interdisciplinary team of eight ASU faculty members from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Petra Fromme, Alexandra Ros, Tom Moore and Anna Moore) and the Department of Physics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (John Spence, Uwe Weierstall, Kevin Schmidt and Bruce Doak) worked together with national and international collaborators on this project. The results were made possible by the excellent work of current ASU graduate students Christopher Kupitz, Shibom Basu, Daniel James, Dingjie Wang, Chelsie Conrad, Shatabdi Roy Chowdhury, Jay-How Yang and ASU doctoral graduates and post-docs Kimberley Rendek, Mark Hunter, Jesse Bergkamp, Tzu-Chiao Chao and Richard Kirian. Two undergraduate students Danielle Cobb and Brenda Reeder supported the team and gained extensive research experience by working hand in hand with graduate students, researchers and faculty at the free electron laser at Stanford. Four ASU senior scientists and postdoctoral researchers (Ingo Grotjohann, Nadia Zatsepin, Haiguang Liu and Raimund Fromme) supported the faculty in the design, planning and execution of the experiments, and were instrumental in evaluation of the data. The first authorship of the paper is jointly held by the ASU graduate students Christopher Kupitz, who’s dissertation is based on the development of new techniques for the growth and biophysical characterization of nanocrystals; and Shibom Basu, who devoted three years of his doctoral work to the development of the data evaluation methods. “It is so exciting to be a part of this groundbreaking research and to have the opportunity to participate in this incredible international collaboration,” said Kupitz, who will graduate this summer with a Ph.D. in biochemistry. “I joined the project because it fascinates me to work at the LCLS accelerator on this important biological project.” “The most exciting aspect of the work on Photosystem II is the prospect of making molecular movies to witness the water splitting process through time-resolved crystallography," added Basu. National and international collaborators on the project include the team of Henry Chapman at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, who with the ASU team and researchers at the MPI in Heidelberg pioneered the new method of serial femtosecond crystallography. Other collaborators included a team led by Matthias Frank, an expert on laser spectroscopy and time-resolved studies with FELs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the team of Yulia Pushkar at Purdue University, who supported the work with characterization of the crystals by electron paramagnetic resonance. “We’re tantalizingly close,” said Chapman of the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science at DESY and a pioneer in X-ray free laser studies of crystallized proteins. “I think this shows that we really are on the right track and it will work.” Additional collaborators include scientist from SLAC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the Stanford PULSE Institute; Max Planck Institutes for medical research and nuclear physics; the University of Hamburg; the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser and the Center for Ultrafast Imaging; the University of Melbourne in Australia; Uppsala University in Sweden; and University of Regina in Canada. The work was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, German Research Foundation (DFG), the Max Planck Society, the SLAC and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Directed Research and Development programs, and the BioXFEL Science and Technology Center, among others.