Biological X-ray imaging is an emerging technique that uses hard, i.e. high energy, X-rays to image tissues or even entire organisms (in contrast to X-ray crystallography, which is used to probe the structures of proteins and viruses). Biological X-ray imaging will play an important role in EMBL Hamburg\u2019s future portfolio, enabling scientists to answer fundamental questions in biology and to study life on multiple scales.<\/p>\n\n\n
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My earliest recollection of science was following my father around at CERN when he used to go into the lab at the weekend to catch up on his work. My highlight was when he\u2019d let me feed the punch cards for his computer program into the machine! I was probably about 5 or 6 years old at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My background is physics, but I have always been fascinated by biology. Developing synchrotron X-ray methods that can be applied to solving problems in the life sciences is a perfect way to combine both disciplines. I started my career at the Synchrotron Radiation Source, where I was involved in developing the multiwavelength anomalous dispersion method for protein structure solution. Later, I moved to Diamond Light Source, the new UK synchrotron, where I led the team designing and constructing the first three macromolecular crystallography beamlines. When I started out, most data were collected on film, and beamlines were controlled from the command line. I had the privilege to participate in the development of hardware and software at the Synchrotron Radiation Source and Diamond, which resulted in the macromolecular crystallography beamlines becoming the automated, streamlined facilities that their users have come to expect. Having done that, I wanted a new challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Biology doesn\u2019t happen in isolation. While macromolecular crystallography is incredibly powerful at showing us biological structure at the atomic level, I wanted to explore biological context. This led me to contribute to the development of cryo soft X-ray tomography, a technique that allows you to image the entire volume of a cell without the need for staining or sectioning. I built a beamline, an \u2018X-ray microscope\u2019, to do this at Diamond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recently, there have been some amazing results using hard X-rays to image thicker, bulk soft tissue samples, and this is my current focus. I want to develop X-ray imaging techniques so that we can image larger samples and use the data to find the tiny region of interest \u2013 and thus guide the scientist to where they need to collect the next, higher-resolution dataset.<\/p>\n\n\n