Speaker
Description
Proteins have evolved into complex nanomachines able to couple dynamics over
many orders of magnitude in time to precisely and exquisitely control
chemical reactions and processes such as signal transfer and the generation
of mechanical force. To understand how they are able to achieve this
requires not only the determination of their structure, but also study of
their dynamics. Time-resolved structural biology is one route towards such
understanding, providing both high-resolution global structural information
and insight into dynamics. However, its application to a broad range of
proteins has been hampered by challenges in both reaction initiation and
access to high-brilliance sources with the needed photon flux for fast
time-resolved experiments. I will present our progress towards tackling both
these challenges by the development of new photocaging tools and the use of
multiplexing data collection strategies that enable fast time-resolved
experiments on weak photon sources with slow detectors.
