New head of science at Australian Synchrotron talks life science research

X-ray optics specialist from La Trobe University, Dr Andrew Peele, has been appointed the new head of science at the Australian Synchrotron.

In this exclusive interview with Australian Life Scientist, Peele talks about how the Synchrotron aims to work with life scientists to produce world class research.

Peele comes to the Australian Synchrotron with a background developing novel high resolution imaging techniques, three dimensional imaging and other techniques using synchrotron sources, and he's worked with life scientists in the past, including Professor Leanne Tilley at LaTrobe.

"The Australian Synchrotron has huge engagement and investment from life sciences," says Peele. "Probably half of our beam lines have significant involvement with life scientists, such as through protein crystallography looking at protein structure, but also our small and wide angle X-ray scattering beam lines, which can engage with the structures of proteins and solving the problems of function of the mechanisms inside cells.

"We also have one of our flagship beamlines, the imaging and medical beamline, which is looking at larger living systems, from small animal imaging moving all the way up to imaging and therapy for people.

"That beam line also has the capacity to do three dimensional imaging, and is the first one that will be using the new massive computing cluster to do the tomographic reconstructions in realtime.

"We also have beam lines that look at spectroscopy and structure. The X-ray fluorescence microscopy beamline allows some very fine details, for example, looking at seeds, specifically at the distribution of metals in that seed.

"The plans going forward are to build on this capacity. The Australian Synchrotron was set up initially to have nine beam lines, but with capacity to go up to over 30. The plans were always to build out with extensions of the techniques we have as well as new techniques, and to see where the demand is. And life scientists have particularly driven the demand for new beam lines.

"So in our new science case we have three phases of development, and in the most advanced phase there is significant representation from life sciences. Those beam lines include things like the high coherence nanoprobe. This will look in very high detail using diffraction techniques at the inside of cells down to large protein complexes.

"There's an X-ray absorbtion spectroscopy beamline in the medium energy range that will engage directly in biology and medicine, for instance looking at metalloproteins like hemoglobin, where the protein structure has a very important engagement with key metals.

"The technique can identify those metals very readily in extremely minute portions, so you can look through part of the sample of living tissue and see whether there's uptake of those metals into the proteins, and what the distributions are.

"There are other proposals to extend what we can already do in protein crystallography, and to have a high performance protein crystallography beam line. That community has been incredibly successful, and in recent months we've had two Nature publications resulting from work from that beam line.

"We're also looking at the small angle scattering biological beam lines, which can be used to get information about overall shape from less ordered arrays, such as samples that you haven't been able to crystalise.

"What we're looking to do is grow the great work we're already doing in life sciences, and embed that in to the new development plan."