So it has been a week since I left Melbourne and I have participated in something that has changed my perspective of the world. It is a rare opportunity to stop and appreciate moments like these, where you can feel from one moment to the next a shift in the way you think about the world.

I have the rare pleasure of doing what I love for work, Science! As part of my role at the ARC centre of excellence for advanced molecular imaging I have had the opportunity to be involved in an extremely exciting project. This project is called the Single Particle Imaging initiative (SPI for short) and involves trying to push the boundaries of conventional diffraction to achieve atomic resolution from single particles. While the ultimate aim of the project is the ambitious goal of trying to capture movies of molecular interactions such as the binding of drugs to virus particles, we are still a long way from achieving this. As with most things the journey of discovery starts at the beginning with small steps.

So far the SPI has been able to achieve some incredible results and in this past week we were able to demonstrate that it is possible to deliver single virus cells (28 nm MS2) into an x-ray beam that is less than a quarter of the diameter of a human hair. We also demonstrated that we can get useful data from such a particle and hopefully we will be able to use that data to reconstruct the external shape of the particle. This technique is revolutionary because it uses individual particles instead of the crystals typically required to achieve atomic resolution. Although we are not there yet, if this data proves to be what we expect from it, we will be able to demonstrate that we are working on the foundations of a technique which may forever change the way we look at structural biology. It is a lofty goal and is certainly a challenge yet it is one that inspires me contribute and learn from the large global collaborative team.

These experiments are the result of work by over 100 researchers from over 20 different institutions around the globe and at this particular beamtime (an allocation time to use a powerful x-ray source to perform an experiment) we brought together 20 people from 6 nations to work together to push the frontiers of science.

You can find a copy of my video summaries and an interview I did with beamline scientist Andrew Aquila (One of the people that maintains and runs the x-ray source and leader of SPI). There will be more videos to come in the next few days which you will be able to find at the videos summaries page so please keep an eye out for them.

Cheers,
Daniel