BioCAT offered its fourth MuscleX workshop from May 15-16 2025. This entirely virtual workshop had over 100 registered attendees.

BioCAT hosted its 4th MuscleX Symposium from May 15–16, 2025. BioCAT scientist Weikang Ma opened the symposium with an introductory presentation on the scientific missions supported at BioCAT, followed by a historical overview of BioCAT presented by BioCAT PI Tom Irving. The symposium featured 10 scientific presentations highlighting recent muscle studies using X-ray diffraction and other structural techniques. Of the 10 presentations, 6 were given by early-stage scientists and graduate students—underscoring a strong commitment to supporting the next generation of muscle researchers. With over 100 registered attendees and approximately 70 participants present live, the symposium fostered vibrant discussions, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the BioCAT Town hall on January 10th!

We announced a lot of exciting new/upgraded capabilities. Some of that you can now find on our website, while others we'll be updating shortly.

Perhaps the most important announcement is that BioCAT is resuming user operations this spring, with user beamtime available starting February 13th.

One announcement we don't want to slip through the cracks is that Dr. Jesse Hopkins has taken over as BioCAT Director, while Dr. Tom Irving remains on as BioCAT PI.

For the beamline in general we announced:

1. 8x reduction in main horizontal beam size and 16x reduction in microfocus horizontal beamsize with APS-U.
2. A $2 million supplement from the NIH to upgrade our optics to take full advantage of the new APS-U source.

For solution SAXS, we announced:

1. A new customized HPLC system for SEC-SAXS and SEC-MALS-SAXS capable of simultaneously running a sample and equilibrating a column, with flow paths switchable at the press of a button, control software incorporated into BioCAT's BioCon software, and temperature control from 4-40 C.
2. A new asymmetric flow field-flow fractionation (AF4) instrument coupled to MALS and SAXS (AF4-MALS-SAXS). This is a method for separating …

BioCAT is very excited to be welcoming users back to the facility starting in February. If you are interested in beam time next run, please contact the appropriate beamline scientist: Dr. Weikang Ma for muscle/fiber diffraction and Dr. Max Watkins for solution SAXS.

If you want beamtime, you can also check out our guide to applying for time.

A few key updates on how things have changed from before the APS-U dark period:

1. The APS has a new proposal system, called the Universal Proposal System (UPS). BioCAT users should put in either Standard General User Proposals (GUPs), which are good for 2 years and are the preferred proposal style at BioCAT, or Rapid Access GUPs, which are good for 1 run. For the upcoming spring run only Rapid Access proposals can be accepted, due to the proposal deadlines.
2. On-site users must request a dosimeter at least 3 business days in advance of their experiment in order to carry out their experiments.

BioCAT held its tenth intensive HOW-TO course in BioSAXS from 12/10/24-12/13/24 with 37 remote participants. There were four days of lectures and hands-on software tutorials on the basics of BioSAXS data collection and processing from expert practitioners in the field. Participants could elect to mail in samples for data collection prior to the course, and roughly half of them sent research samples and were able to analyze their own data as part of the workshop.

Some of the participants and instructors at the Everything BioSAXS 10 Workshop.

BioCAT held its tenth BioSAXS training course from 12/10/24-12/13/24. There were 37 remote participants and 7 instructors. The workshop was held entirely online, via Zoom, for ~5 hours each day.

Day one started off with an excellent overview of the basic physics of SAXS and what kind of information you can obtain from the technique by Dr. Thomas Weiss (BL4-2 beamline, SSRL). This was followed by a talk from Dr. Jesse Hopkins (BioCAT) on the basics of SAXS instrumentation and different types of SAXS experiments. Dr. Kushol Gupta (Penn. State) then discussed the extremely important and sometimes overlooked steps of how to actually plan and …

Starting with the APS 2025-1 run next year BioCAT will be resuming user operations. After the long dark period for the APS upgrade (APS-U) project, we are very excited to be welcoming you back to the facility early next year. If you are interested in beam time next run, please contact the appropriate beamline scientist: Dr. Weikang Ma for muscle/fiber diffraction and either of Drs. Max Watkins and Jesse Hopkins for solution SAXS.

We also invite you to join us on January 10th at 1 pm CST for a virtual Town Hall where we will discuss the upgrade's effects on BioCAT, new capabilities that we've added during the dark period, and remind you about the process for getting beamtime at BioCAT. The tentative schedule is:

The BioCAT team, led by Prof. Thomas Irving (Illinois Institute of Technology) has been awarded $2 million in supplementary funds from the National Institutes of Health to upgrade the BioCAT beamline. These funds will let us upgrade our x-ray optics (mostly original to the beamline and more than 20 years old) to modern state-of-the-art systems that can take full advantage of the new upgraded APS source. These new optics will provide smaller, more intense x-ray beams and improved beam stability.

This project will replace the focusing optics with new KB-style horizontal and vertical focusing mirrors and the monochromator with a new system with both silicon and multilayer optics to provide both energy resolution and high flux. The upgrade is expected to take ~2 years to complete and user operations will continue unhindered while it is taking place.