Abstract
“Tough day,” sighs Allen M. Orville, shaking his head. The biophysicist is standing in the vast underground experiment hall of the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (EuXFEL) facility near Hamburg, Germany, at the end of a 12-hour wrestling bout with the biggest, brightest X-ray source on the planet. For now, the machine appears to be winning. Orville leads a group at the U.K.’s Diamond Light Source that develops hardware and software for EuXFEL and also supports researchers who bring their samples here. Today, he’s with an international team studying the mechanics of two particular enzymes: One of them makes antibiotics, and the other breaks them down. Understanding exactly how they work could help scientists develop better antimicrobial drugs. To watch the enzymes in action, the researchers are focusing—or at least attempting to focus—EuXFEL’s intense X-ray pulses so that they produce a series of structural snapshots of the biomolecules, rather like high-speed
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