The context and the objectives of this workshop (which is associated to the 4th SOLEIL Users' Meeting) are as follow:
The complexity of living organisms and how they function presents a huge challenge to modern biology. Multiple interactions and inter-relations at increasing levels of complexity (from a molecular level through to the level of cells or tissue) need to be taken into account in order to understand how an organism functions. The measurement tools that a biophysicist has at her disposal vary in the scale of resolution from macroscopic to atomic, and it is essential to combine these tools in order to have this “holistic” view of complex biological mechanisms. Much work is in progress on the development of multimodal approaches in order to obtain this holistic view, but it is often difficult, amongst the plethora of biophysical techniques available, to choose the best methods to address a particular biological question. SOLEIL is at the forefront of the development of “holistic” approaches, in that it offers beamline facilities capable of an unusually large range of biophysical measurement possibilities and a wide range of opportunites for combined approaches. The different beamlines give access to measurements varying in resolution from the atomic (X-ray diffraction, Small angle scattering, mass spectroscopy, Synchrotron Radiation Circular Dichroism) up to cells and tissues (UV imaging, IR imaging and spectroscopy), with further beamlines in the life sciences already in the planning stage. BioOrbit will endeavour to illustrate the different synchrotron techniques and their complementarity with other techniques such as Cryo-electron microscopy, soft X-ray imaging, NMR, etc.
