Other organisations recorded by Europe PMCUniversity of OxfordThese are researcher affiliations; the award is counted once under the primary recipient above.
Funding£40.5M
PeriodApr 2021 — Apr 2031
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Diamond Light Source, the UK’s synchrotron, is getting a decade-long, high-energy upgrade called Diamond-II that will boost its electron beam from 3 to 3.5 gigaelectronvolts and add five new beamlines. This matters because Diamond is a workhorse for structural biology—it reveals the atomic shapes of proteins, viruses, and cellular machinery. Without such detail, researchers cannot see how a drug binds to a target, how a bacterium evades an antibiotic, or how an enzyme catalyses a reaction. The upgrade will allow them to study larger sample volumes, giving cellular and molecular studies real biological context, and to capture dynamic processes at the microsecond scale—fast enough to watch proteins fold or drugs dock in real time. If successful, Diamond-II will accelerate drug discovery, vaccine design, and research into antimicrobial resistance and cancer. It will also serve physical sciences—battery chemistry, catalysis, and quantum materials—so its impact reaches beyond medicine into energy storage and manufacturing. This is fundamental infrastructure, not a single experiment. The upgrade keeps the UK at the frontier of structural science, enabling discoveries that, like previous synchrotron work on ribosomes or HIV enzymes, may later transform medicine.
View original technical description
Diamond Light Source is an essential UK resource enabling both academic and industrial research experiments in areas as diverse as aircraft engineering, surface science, battery research, chemistry and catalysis, quantum materials and the life sciences. For biomedical research Diamond is indispensable to structural investigations that reveal the fundamental mechanisms of life and disease in atomic detail and at the cellular and molecular level. To date Diamond has impacted areas including drug discovery, fundamental cancer research, antimicrobial resistance, vaccine design, enzyme engineering and research into age related illnesses, plant science and agriculture. Diamond-II comprises a long-term major upgrade to the storage ring, greatly increasing the beam brightness and the electron beam energy from 3 to 3.5 GeV. The 10-year programme will also deliver five new beamlines, a substantial upgrade to computational resource for user data and analysis, and dark period mitigating beamline capacity for Diamond’s most demanding and productive user community. This will enormously enhance Diamond’s existing capabilities in both physical and life science, and, in biomedical research, will introduce powerful new techniques both for the structural investigation of large sample volumes to provide context to cellular and molecular studies and for dynamic studies of life at the microsecond level.
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