BCSB Bowlers Back Again!

Sadly, today was Charlie Eigenbrot’s last PRT meeting, since he is retiring from Genentech in June. We will miss him! (But we do hope we comes back to visit us periodically at the synchrotron)

Once again, the BCSB teamed up with several other groups at the ALS to host a booth at the ACA. It was great to hang out with our ALS colleagues and to see many of our users.        

A special welcome to our SULI student, Sayan Roychowhury, who is majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He is here with us for the fall term, and writing code to process visual images of protein crystals and center them automatically in the x-ray beam. SULI is the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program in which the host lab (in this case, LBNL) pays for a student to work for a few months to gain experience at a national lab and to encourage students to remain in STEM fields.

We are very pleased to now have Daniil Prigozhin in the BCSB. He comes to us with a strong background in crystallography, both growing crystals and solving structures. He completed his PhD work with Dr. Tom Alber at UC Berkeley in 2014, then did a post-doc with Dr. Yorgo Modis at the University of Cambridge,…

We measured the temperature at the sample during warming of the pin base, and preliminary tests so far show that the heat is not transferred to the loop during two minutes of base warming. Tests are continuing now to determine how well the warmer removes ice and frost from the bases.

Images of a crystal in a loop before and after using the pin base warmer:

We held a jelly bean counting contest at our booth at the ACA. Matt Clifton of Nurix was the winner. Good job, Matt!