Research Facilities for Biology at the Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury Laboratory

Abstract

This report is an introduction to and brief description of the facilities available for research in biology and related subjects at the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) at the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) at Daresbury. The SRS (a 2-GeV accelerator with a critical wavelength of ca. 0.39 nm) and the associated instrumentation and infrastructure has undergone continuous development over the last few years. Further development is still in progress. Among the recently completed projects with a major impact on the exploitation of synchrotron radiation in the general area of biology, biochemistry and biophysics, one must include the implementation of the High Brightness Lattice (HBL), the construction and equipping of the Biology Support Laboratory (BSL), which is jointly funded between the SERC and the Medical Research Council (MRC), and the successful implementation of a time-resolved x-ray diffraction station, incorporating a variety of one- and two-dimensional position sensitive x-ray detector systems. Besides these recent developments, there are now a number of established facilities for time-resolved spectroscopy, X-ray absorption spectroscopy and protein crystallography. The latter two subjects have stations making use of the radiation from a 5-Tesla superconducting wiggler as well as stations taking radiation from the dipole bending magnets.