Life Sciences Collaborative Access Team

The Life Sciences Collaborative Access Team (LS-CAT) provides macromolecular cystallography resources for those with a need to determine the structure of proteins. Mainly LS-CAT provides access to state of the art x-ray diffraction facilities at Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source where extremely intense beams of x-rays are focused using both mirrors and beryllium lenses onto tiny protein crystals. The x-rays diffracted by these crystals are collected with giant CCD detectors that produce the images needed to calculate where the atoms in the protein crystal are.