Getting our feet wet
Team diffUSE convened at Astera HQ in Emeryville, CA on June 23-24, 2025. The whole visit was a treat – meeting brilliant people, brainstorming new ideas – but for me, the highlight was an impromptu trip up the bay for a wee bit of X-ray data collection.
ALS beamline 8.3.1 is hallowed ground. Although I’ve seen it before on previous trips, this was my first time collecting data there. What fun!
We were aided in our quest by Galen Correy (Fraser Lab at UCSF) who donated a tray full of beautiful SARS-CoV-2 Nsp3 Macrodomain crystals. Galen and collaborators have done some amazing crystallography with this system: check out their ligand-screening campaign and neutron diffraction experiments. As we discovered at ALS that afternoon, it also has beautiful diffuse scattering!
The diffUSE collaboration has an ambitious open science policy. In the logbook, you can find our beamtime notes and read a preliminary analysis of the diffuse scattering.