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Get the picture: studying protein structure in 3D. Credit: SSRL

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced last week that it will put $18 million into “significantly” improving two major synchrotron facilities. The base funding of both facilities comes from the Department of Energy (DoE), and the move reflects the increasing use of synchrotron radiation by life scientists.

Under a memorandum of understanding from the NIH and DoE, the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), a division of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, will receive $14 million from the NIH this year, and the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, will receive $4 million.

Synchrotron radiation — bright X-rays produced by electrons circulating in a huge storage ring — gives information on objects at an atomic and molecular level. Biological researchers use it to study protein structure, but drug development is also a key application.

For instance, researchers used DoE-funded synchrotron light sources to develop protease inhibitors for treating HIV infection.

According to Marvin Cassman, director of the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Stanford money is the first instalment of a $45-million upgrade.

The money will be used to improve the accelerator and instrumentation at NSLS, while the SSRL's electron storage ring will be upgraded to optimize it for biological use. NIH officials point out, however, that the accelerator upgrades at both facilities will benefit all users of the two sources.

In recent years, structural biologists supported by the NIH have become major users of synchrotron sources. This has put pressure on DoE-funded facilities traditionally used by physicists and materials scientists.

But biologists have complained that access to DoE synchrotron sources can take more than six months to arrange (see Nature 393, 3 1998 & Nature 396, 203; 1998). Last year, a government working group was established to assess how the sources could adapt to their increasing use by biologists.

The upgrades are one result. “These resources are critical to the development of modern biology, and we feel a responsibility to ensure that they are operated at a level that will benefit the community we serve, and hopefully everybody else,” says Cassman, who headed the working group.

NIH director Harold Varmus said that the new money “holds the promise of providing dramatically improved capabilities for determining the structure of important molecules”. For instance, the upgrade at the SSRL will enable its five protein-crystallography beamlines each to collect up to five times more data.

Wayne Hendrickson, a structural biologist who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Columbia University, calls the initiative “a very positive move”. While recognizing life scientists' growing need for synchrotron radiation, he says, it properly leaves supervision of the expensive facilities in the hands of a single agency, the DoE.

Two newer DoE-funded synchrotron sources will not benefit from the new money. They are the Advanced Photon Source at the DoE's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the Advanced Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.