A Biological Small Angle X-ray Scattering Station (BioSAXS) for the Compact Light

7. Project Summary/Abstract We propose to develop a Biological Small-angle X-ray Scattering (BioSAXS) station for the Compact Light Source, a powerful new generation of X-ray sources, which will enable biologists and biochemists to pursue state-of-the-artresearch in macromolecular structure studies in their own laboratories. The frontier of structural biology is the determination of large macromolecular complexes-the machines that drive the workings of the cell. X-ray crystallography is the method of choice for revealing the structures of these complexes, and has had important successes. However, since many complexes have proven to be difficult or impossible to crystallize, alternative methods are required. Lower resolution methods like SAXS can provide overall shape information of the complex that can be used, together with known substructures, for modeling its architecture. The advent of synchrotron sources together with advanced computing has led to a renaissance for SAXS as a complementary technique to