Key Departmental News

"Analytical Chemistry and the Life Sciences." BER program manager Roland F. Hirsch has written an essay "Analytical Chemistry and the Life Sciences," which appears in the March 1, 2001, issue of the journal Analytical Chemistry, published by the American Chemical Society. The main point in the essay is that advances in analytical chemistry has enabled great progress with basic concepts in the life sciences, but this in turn has created great demands for new analytical instrumentation and techniques. The machinery of living cells is much more complicated than once was thought. The cellular factory that produces proteins, the ribosome, is cited as "a good example of the irreducible complexity of many cellular systems." Much of the key structural information about the ribosome has been obtained at BER's stations at DOE synchrotron and neutron facilities. The author states: "Analytical techniques offering much greater speed, selectivity, spatial and temporal resolution, and dynamic range will be needed to capture the full chemical complexity of these systems." The essay appears as a guest editorial by invitation of the editor of the journal, Royce W. Murray of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It can be read at:
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/ancham-a/73/i05/html/editorial.html
Contact: Roland Hirsch, SC-73, 3-9009

Infrared Spectromicroscopy featured on journal cover. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are using the infrared spectromicroscopy station on beamline 1.4.3 of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) to study chemical changes in living cells under various physiological conditions and stresses. This research is featured on the cover of the February 2001 issue of Applied Spectroscopy, the premier journal for research applying all forms of spectroscopy to scientific and technical problems. The cover shows a picture of the ALS, a diagram of the beamline and station, a picture of the apparatus, the results of a study of beam sharpness, and pictures representing applications of the new technique in geomicrobiology and cellular biology.

Inside this issue is a research article demonstrating that exposure to the infrared beam from the synchrotron does not appreciably heat a biological sample. This is the first step toward one main objective of the BER-funded research, to determine whether exposure to the beam has any near- or long-term physiological effects on individual living cells. Viability tests on cells exposed to the beam are now being carried out. In a second aspect of the research, an infrared microscope stage that enables incubation of cells under controlled conditions is being developed for application in biomedical research. The principal investigators are Hoi-Ying N. Holman, Michael C. Martin, and Wayne R. McKinney.
Contact: Roland Hirsch, SC-73, 3-9009

EMSL Publisher Software Wins Federal Laboratory Consortium Award. A word processing and presentation tool developed by software engineers at the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) has won a Federal Laboratory Consortium Award. The software, entitled EMSL Publisher, allows users to view and edit documents in rich-text format, and has the unique ability to run on any computer platform. With this tool, collaborators from multiple institutions can easily view and edit the same document over the Internet without the loss of format or readability. EMSL software engineers developed this tool several years ago in anticipation of the need for enhancing the capabilities of the EMSL collaboratory. PNNL has signed a license agreement with e-commerce vendor Flashline.com of Cleveland, Ohio, to sell EMSL Publisher on its web site (http://www.flashline.com/, search "PNNL.")
Contact: Paul Bayer, SC-74, 3-5324