THE SWISS -NORWEGIAN BEAM LINES  (General description)

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Synopsis

The mission of the SNBL is to provide scientists from both Norway and Switzerland, from both academia
and industry, with increased access to synchrotron radiation. A user on SNBL  has access to state-of-the-art,
custom-designed instrumentation for diffraction and absorption experiments. Both partner countries have
relatively large and exceptionally active scientific communities using X-ray diffraction and absorption as their
main probes; for these groups the amount of public beamtime offered by ESRF was insufficient from day one,
and this is the raison d’être of the Swiss-Norwegian Beam Lines at ESRF.
Nowadays, it is fully understood by the scientific community that many of the most challenging problems
in structural crystallography can be solved only with the use of synchrotron radiation, and even then,
often enough, only by harnessing the combined power of two or more experimental techniques
(such as, e.g., powder and single-crystal diffraction).
The SNBL has four such different experimental techniques, which are distributed over two beamlines,
and presently include:

• High-resolution single-crystal diffractometry

• Large-area diffraction imaging

• High-resolution powder diffractometry

• EXAFS spectrometry

Events

ESRF Young Scientist Award goes to SNBL scientist  Dr. Yaroslav Filinchuk is the recipient of the ESRF prize in 2010 for “his outstanding work on the chemistry of solid state hydrides”. This Ukrainian chemist works at the Swiss–Norwegian Beamline (BM1) at the ESRF since 2006.

Yaroslav Filinchuk receives the YSA prize from Anton Plech

Swiss-Norwegian workshop on
Simultaneous Raman-X-ray diffraction/absorption studies for the in situ investigations (booklet)

High gas pressure meeting (program)

Swiss-Norwegian Seminar
"Synchrotron Radiation in Studies of Nanoscaled Materials"

Highlights

Tracking Flavin Conformations in Protein Crystal Structures with

Raman Spectroscopy and QM/MM Calculations

Damaged goods? Detailed knowledge of the cofactor conformation is essential for the functional analysis of flavoenzyme crystal structures. However, photoelectrons generated by X-rays during crystal-data collection can reduce the flavin cofactor and thus change its geometry (see picture). Monitoring of the flavin vibrational modes by Raman spectroscopy during X-ray crystal-data collection provided important information on the actual flavin state. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2010

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