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CoolHand [soylentnews.org] writes:

This imaging breakthrough [sciencedaily.com] seems as if it will fundamentally improve our ability to understand and monitor chemical processes at the molecular level.

Every process that sustains life is carried out by proteins, but understanding how these complex molecules do their jobs depends on learning the arrangement of their atoms -- and how this structure changes -- as they react. No imaging method for observing molecular movement in such detail and speed had been available, until now.

A team of biochemists and physicists, led by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Imperial College London, have documented for the first time the fundamental processes of a chemical reaction unfolding in real time. They captured images -- 25 trillion per second -- of a tiny crystalized protein as it reacted to light.

This allowed them build up a picture of what the protein was doing every few femtoseconds -- quadrillionths of a second. The results are published in the journal Science.

Previously, scientists had relied on a method called X-ray crystallography, which could only take a static image of a protein. Now, they have been able to build up a series of crystallographic snapshots into a molecular movie over extremely short timescales.

Study co-author Dr Jasper van Thor from Imperial's Department of Life Sciences said: "Usually, we can only image the structure after the reaction, and infer what has happened. This is the first time we have been able to image crystal structures on timescales where the proteins are still undergoing the reaction.

"What happens during these timescales determines the outcome of the reaction, so knowing exactly what's going on is vital. Previously our information and images of how the reactions work have been based on theory and spectroscopy. Now we can see it in reality."

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