After the left ventricle of the heart contracts, it must relax efficiently to prepare to refill and supply the body with blood on the next beat. An increasing number of patients — including nearly all patients with heart failure — suffer from impaired relaxation, which is part of a clinical syndrome known as diastolic dysfunction. Currently, treatments for impaired relaxation do not exist.

A team of Wayne State University School of Medicine researchers led by Charles Chung, Ph.D., assistant professor of physiology, recently received a $1,894,271 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to address the critical need for new drug targets and diagnostic indexes for diastolic dysfunction using novel biomechanical tests that ultimately can be translated into clinical practice.

According to Chung, the project was inspired by his research team’s finding that how quickly the heart’s muscle moves is directly related to how fast the muscle can relax. The project will use unique experiments and imaging techniques to link mechanical properties of the heart with models of heart failure that occur in patients.

“My lab’s main research focus is to understand how the heart muscle moves at …

A team of researchers led by Prof. Thomas Irving (Illinois Institute of Technology) has received an $8.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue to operate the Biophysics Collaborative Access Team (BioCAT) facility at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory for the next 5 years. The facility provides access to the most intense X-ray beams in the Western Hemisphere for the study of non-crystalline biological materials such as muscle, connective tissue, amyloids, viruses, proteins, and other large biological molecules and their complexes, in order to understand the structural underpinnings of human maladies such as heart disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s. Several COVID 19 projects have been hosted since the pandemic began. The other members of the scientific staff at BioCAT who co-wrote the proposal are beamline scientists Weikang Ma, Srinivas Chakravarthy and Jesse Hopkins.

The new grant is a NIGMS P30 grant for Mature Synchrotron Resources, and allows BioCAT to focus on our core mission of providing cutting edge facilities and experimental capabilities for our users. Among other highlights, the grant will provide a new state of the art x-ray detector (Dectris EIGER 2 XE 9M), which has a larger area, smaller …

BioCAT held its sixth intensive HOW-TO course in BioSAXS from 10/26/20-10/29/20 with 24 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.

Participants and instructors at the Everything BioSAXS 6 Workshop.

BioCAT held its sixth annual BioSAXS training course from 10/26/20-10/29/20. There were 24 remote participants and 6 instructors. The workshop was held entirely online, via BlueJeans, for ~4 hours each day. Before the workshop started, participants were able to mail samples to BioCAT for SAXS data collection. This data was then sent to them, and they were able to analyze it as part of the workshop.

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. Richard Gillilan (BioSAXS beamline, CHESS). This was followed by a talk from Dr. Kushol …

BioCAT held its fifth intensive HOW-TO course in BioSAXS from 11/5/19-11/7/19 with 13 on-site participants and 24 remote participants. There was a day and a half of lectures and hands-on software tutorials on the basics of BioSAXS data collection and processing from expert practitioners in the field. This was followed by data collection on the BioCAT beamline and data analysis help for on-site participants. Many students brought research samples for the data collection portion of the workshop.

Participants and instructors at the Everything BioSAXS 5 Workshop.

BioCAT held its fifth annual BioSAXS training course from 11/5/19-11/7/19. There were 13 on-site participants, 24 remote participants, and 6 instructors. 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. Xiaobing Zuo (12ID, APS). This was followed by a talk from Dr. Kushol Gupta (Penn. State) going over the extremely important and sometimes overlooked steps of how to actually plan and perform SAXS experiments. He covered everything from planning what data you want to collect to sample preparation for the experiment, to complementary biophysical techniques for verifying …

BioCAT held its fourth intensive HOW-TO course in BioSAXS from 11/5/18-11/7/18. The 11 participants received a day and a half of lectures and hands-on software tutorials on the basics of BioSAXS data collection and processing from expert practitioners in the field. This was followed by data collection on the BioCAT beamline and data analysis help. Many students brought research samples for the data collection portion of the workshop.

Participants and instructors at the Everything BioSAXS 4 Workshop.

BioCAT held its fourth annual BioSAXS training course from 11/5/18-11/7/18. There were 11 participants and 6 instructors. Day one started off with breakfast, followed by an excellent overview of the basic physics of SAXS and what kind of information you can obtain from the technique by Dr. Xiaobing Zuo (12ID, APS). This was followed by two talks from Dr. Lokesh Gakhar (Iowa State) going over the extremely important and sometimes overlooked steps of how to actually plan and perform SAXS experiments. He covered everything from planning what data you want to collect to sample preparation for the experiment, to recommended notes you should take while at the beamline. Following that Dr. Srinivas Chakravarthy (BioCAT …