As a part of Argonne's ongoing Technology Transfer Program, this detector technology has been transferred to Oxford Instruments via Work for Others and licensing agreements. The Accelerator Technology Group of Oxford Instruments will be able to deliver highly advanced X-ray detectors to the scientific community, all over the world, based on the technology developed by Argonne. At left, principal investigator Steve Naday of ECT's Electronics Engineering Group, and Joy Morris of Oxford complete final testing for the first commercial version of the ANL CCD-based area detector design. The detector is designed explicity for protein crystallography experimentation. Mary Westbrook, now manager of ECT's Client Computing Group, is a co-developer of the detector.
Molecular processes dictate our lives and the lives of all living things.
The onset of cancer can be caused by the change of a single atom on a protein that regulates the molecular reading of our genetic code. Diabetes, sickle-cell anemia, Huntington's disease, and many psychotic diseases all are examples of disease processes that can be associated with explicit molecular defects. The madness of King George III, which lead to the American Revolution, was due to a single point defect on a single enzyme in King George's brain. Every moment of our lives is controlled and defined by the metabolic ebb and flow of molecular events which, in their turn, are mediated by an abundance of enzymes, metabolic and genetic regulators, and other molecular players in the cellular symphony. These players are, for the most part, proteins.