Fast-action flicks draw chemists' rave reviews
Service, R.
Science 276(5321): 1986-1987
1997
ISSN/ISBN: 0036-8075 PMID: 9221502 Document Number: 478801
Part of a special section on imaging technologies. Scientists around the world are making molecular movies of proteins, semiconductor crystals, and even simple molecules reacting in a gas, using new X-ray and electron-beam schemes. The schemes take repeated frames of the position of each atom in the spotlighted molecule, providing researchers with successive snapshots of its entire atomic structure and a direct look at exactly how a host of chemical reactions unfold. For example, Keith Moffatt, a biochemist at the University of Chicago; Michael Wulff, a physicist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France; and colleagues have unveiled the most detailed picture yet of how the common muscle protein myoglobin carries out its task of storing and releasing small molecules such as oxygen.