UK mad beamline at esrf

A dedicated X-ray beamline in Grenoble, France, will give UK scientists open access to a technique that reveals the atomic structure of proteins. Proteins control nearly every process in the body, from digesting food to fighting infection. To understand how a protein works—or why it malfunctions in disease—researchers need to know the exact position of every atom in its three-dimensional shape. Macromolecular crystallography is the most powerful way to do this, and the MAD (multiple-wavelength anomalous diffraction) method sharpens the picture by tuning X-rays to interact strongly with specific atoms. Currently, UK researchers lack guaranteed access to a top-tier MAD beamline. This grant funds open access to BM14, one of Europe’s best, for the entire UK research community. The beamline is expected to produce several hundred new protein structures. Some will be of direct biomedical importance, revealing targets for drug design or showing how pathogens evade the immune system. Others will advance fundamental understanding of how life works at the molecular level—knowledge that, like past discoveries in structural biology, may underpin future diagnostics, therapies, or synthetic biology tools.