About

About the Case Center for Synchrotron Biosciences

Since its inception by Prof. Mark Chance in 1994 at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in NY, the Center for Synchrotron Biosciences (CSB) has provided the research community with access to state of the art synchrotron-based tools to address a range of important problems in biomedical research. With funding support primarily from the National Institutes of Health (NCRR and later NIBIB), as well as several academic and government partners, the CSB supported beamline capabilities at the original NSLS for 20 years for X-ray absorption spectroscopy, macromolecular crystallography, synchrotron infrared spectroscopy, and hydroxyl radical X-ray footprinting. These resources collectively enabled nearly 2500 publications and 2900 structure deposits in the Protein Databank from the user community, while training a generation of scientists in the application of synchrotron-based structural biology methods.

Following the closure of the NSLS in 2014, the CSB migrated operations to the new NSLS-II, a state-of-the-art 3rd-generation synchrotron facility providing 4 orders of magnitude greater photon brightness and improved stability over the original NSLS facility. In partnership with NSLS-II, and with support from the NIH and NSF, the CSB constructed and now operates the XFP (17-BM) beamline for X-ray footprinting, as part of the NSLS-II Structural Biology science program. The CSB has also increased its emphasis on multi-modal approaches to structural biology via an Integrated Biophysics program that uses the unique resources available at NSLS-II, as well as complementary tools available in the Case Center for Proteomics and Bioinformatics and elsewhere in the CWRU School of Medicine. We welcome inquiries about how CSB capabilities can be applied to your research problems.