look, no crystals!

A new international research facility is due to be built at the DESY site, Hamburg, Germany: an X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL). The promise is that lasing will be possible at such short wavelength that structural biology can be done with single copies of biomolecules, membranes, cells ... So it should open access to high-resolution structures of biological entities that cannot be crystallised.

Read my story in today's issue of Current Biology, page R669:

New structural insights

A signature from Vladimir Putin has
finally secured the construction of
a revolutionary new European X-ray
research facility.