Science Highlight
How Epstein-Barr Virus Infection Triggers Multiple Sclerosis – Contacts: Tobias Lanz and William Robinson (Stanford University)
Autoimmune diseases are caused by the immune system mistakenly attacking the body’s cells. In people with multiple sclerosis (MS), lymphocytes and antibodies attack cells in the central nervous system (CNS). The reasons for immune system malfunction in MS are unknown, but may be related to Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection. If antibodies activated due to their ability to bind an EBV antigen can also bind proteins in CNS cells, autoimmune disease could result. A team of researchers investigated the connection between MS disease and EBV infection by identifying antibodies from MS patients that bind to both cellular and viral targets and analyzing the structural basis of the antibody-antigen binding. Read more...
More SSRL-Related Science
A New Leap in Understanding Nickel Oxide Superconductors
Excerpt from SLAC News Article by Glennda Chui
A new study shows that nickel oxide superconductors, which conduct electricity with no loss at higher temperatures than conventional superconductors do, contain a type of quantum matter called charge density waves, or CDWs, that can accompany superconductivity. The presence of CDWs shows that these recently discovered materials, also known as nickelates, are capable of forming correlated states – “electron soups” that can host a variety of quantum phases, including superconductivity, researchers from SSRL and Stanford University reported in Nature Physics.
“Unlike in any other superconductor we know about, CDWs appear even before we dope the material by replacing some atoms with others to change the number of electrons that are free to move around,” said Wei-Sheng Lee, an investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES) who led the study.
The research team carried out experiments at three x-ray light sources – the Diamond Light Source, SSRL and ALS. Each of these facilities offered specialized tools for probing and understanding the material at a fundamental level. Read more...
X-rays Help Researchers Piece Together Treasured Cellular Gateway for First Time
Excerpt from SLAC News Article by David Krause
Your body is made of close to 100 trillion cells that keep you healthy and alive. Each cell has billions of parts of its own, all of them working in tandem to keep life’s processes moving.
One vital component of a cell is called a nuclear pore, which acts like the doors and windows in a house – they allow important things, like RNA and proteins, to enter and exit a cell’s nucleus. Without nuclear pores, your cells, and everything else in your body, would shut down. Until now, scientists have not seen exactly how nuclear pores are built and how their many parts function.
Enter a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), led by André Hoelz, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and faculty scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). After almost two decades of persistence, researchers successfully mapped the atomic structure of the nuclear pore complex (NPC) by determining the structures of its many components and fitting them together. Seeing how the NPC fits together in cells furthers our understanding about how cells work and will potentially lead to new treatments for certain cancers, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases, and certain heart conditions. Read more...
Did Gutenberg Really Invent Printing? Scientists Use X-ray Light to Compare Similarities in Ancient Asian and Western Texts
Excerpt from Mercury News Article by Lisa M. Krieger
The printing press, one of the most important inventions in human history, was developed within a couple hundred years of each other by two very different cultures, separated by vast distances.
A new research study aims to shed light on this enduring mystery by comparing the chemicals in precious pages of two mid-15th century documents: Germany’s Gutenberg Bible and early Korean Confucian texts. X-ray fluorescence imaging was done at SSRL to study residues on the pages left by metal typefaces. The findings could suggest whether the idea of movable type was conceived independently or shared between the regions by ancient traders.
This research is part of an international project led by UNESCO. Fragile pages from the ancient documents were on loan from archives in Korea and Stanford Library, as well as private collections. The findings — from SSRL and other research institutions using different approaches — will be shared at a conference next April at the Library of Congress.
♦ Mercury News article ♦ CNET video documentary and article ♦ Tiny Mic, Big Lab episode
Awards and Honors
Hendrik Ohldag Elected 2022 AVS Fellow
AVS Fellows are Platinum Members who have made sustained and outstanding technical contributions in areas of interest to AVS. Hendrik Ohldag, LBNL, has been elected “For exploring complex magnetic phenomena using novel x-ray techniques with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.” He previously held a joint appointment between the ALS and SSRL.
60th Birthday Symposium Honoring Zhi-Xun Shen's Contributions
An all-day symposium was held recently to mark the occasion of Zhi-Xun Shen's 60th birthday and to celebrate the many impactful contributions that he has made to high-temperature superconductor research during his career at Stanford. His ties to SSRL go back to the 1980s when he was a graduate student in Ingolf Lindau's group conducting experiments on an earlier iteration of Beam Line 5.
Dr. Shen's work has been recognized by important awards, including the Centennial Lecture of the American Physical Society, the Kamerlingh Onnes Prize; the E.O. Lawrence Award; the Oliver E. Buckley Prize; Einstein Professorship Award. In 2015, Dr. Shen was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2017, he was elected as a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Furthermore in 2019, he was named William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Loeb Lecturer of Physics, Harvard University. Dr. Shen was recognized in 2020 by being named Tage Erlander Guest Professor by the Swedish Research Council and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.
Nishikawa Tetsuji Prize Awarded to Xiaobiao Huang
Xiaobiao Huang has been awarded the Nishikawa Tetsuji Prize “For his contribution to the field of particle accelerators, especially in the domain of accelerator design and operation, model-independent beam dynamics analysis, beam-based optimization and control.”
