NSF grant to support UB’s crystallography research at premier X-ray synchrotron

UB crystallographers will continue their research at the nation’s premier X-ray synchrotron thanks to a $17.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The funding will support the NSF ChemMatCARS team, led by the University of Chicago, and its use of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. The funding, which lasts through August 2029, also represents a three-fold increase since the ChemMatCARS team began operations in 2002. 

“I am tremendously excited not only for my team’s research, because we’re going to get to do some cutting-edge experiments that we’ve never ever been able to do before, but also for the many groups across the country and across the world that our beamline supports,” says Jason Benedict, professor in the UB Department of Chemistry and a co-principal investigator on ChemMatCARS’ advanced crystallography program.

ChemMatCARS operates Sector 15 of the APS, a 1.1-kilometer-long, ring-shaped particle accelerator whose ultrabright X-ray beams allow scientists to examine the atomic structure of everything from proteins to superconductors. 

The APS is currently undergoing an $815 million upgrade that began last year. Once complete, the new synchrotron will generate X-ray beams that are up to 500 times brighter than they were before and should be the brightest X-ray synchrotron in the world. 

ChemMatCARS has used the yearlong shutdown of the APS to construct a second beamline in its sector, funded by a prior NSF grant. It will provide transformative new capabilities, including small-molecule serial crystallography to study reversible and irreversible processes. This new method of crystallography involves taking millions of images of millions of crystals at different points of a chemical reaction.

“You initiate a reaction in the crystal and take a frame of data. Then you take another crystal, initiate the same reaction and take a frame of data two nanoseconds later, and so on. From this you can build up this picture and study irreversible, time-dependent processes,” Benedict explains.

The new beamline will also double the X-ray beam time available to the ChemMatCARS user community to do experiments. Benedict says upward of 200 groups are supported by the group’s beamline, including historically Black colleges and other minority-serving institutions.

“We’ve started to do more outreach to these intuitions so our beamline can enable their science. We’re trying our best to remove any barriers to cutting-edge synchrotron science,” he says.

Once the APS upgrade is completed, Benedict’s team plans to once again visit Argonne National Laboratory, located in Lemont, Illinois, two to three times a year to use the beamline. 

“When you do these experiments, it changes your perspective on what is possible. We are constantly doing cutting-edge science that people did not think could be done,” Benedict says.

ChemMatCARS principal investigator and director is Matthew Tirrell, dean and Founding Pritzker Director of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

Other co-PIs include Ka Yee C. Lee, executive vice president for strategic initiatives and David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago; Mark Schlossman, professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Theodore Betley, Erving Professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University.