EMSL In Brief

EMSL In Briefs are informative, single-page overviews about the science conducted and accomplishments earned by EMSL users.

2008

MRI bioreactor aids in understanding the physiology of live cells. A first-of-its-kind MRI bioreactor [pdf, 96kb], developed at the Department of Energy's EMSL, provides accurate metabolic information for live cells maintained in a controlled growth environment.
From high school through Ph.D., Shawley enjoys decade at EMSL. Charles Shawley has conducted research at EMSL for 10 years [pdf, 66kb], starting when he was in high school.
Steven Wiley appointed to Burroughs Wellcome Fund Advisory Committee. Steven Wiley, Lead Scientist for Biology at the Department of Energy's EMSL, was appointed to an advisory committee for the Burroughs Wellcome Fund [pdf, 76kb], a private, philanthropic organization.
New study shows hidden secondary phases in cobalt-doped zinc oxide. Scientists at EMSL showed that Co:ZnO treated in zinc vapor [pdf, 164kb] demonstrates ferromagnetism, but the signal originates from minute quantities of cobalt or cobalt and zinc that formed in secondary phases.
EMSL launches new look. On June 17, EMSL rolled out a new look [pdf, 101kb] as part of a year-long brand refreshment campaign. The new visual identity will be conveyed to staff and users through new products such as a revitalized website, posters, brochures, presentation materials, and business cards.
Science opens doors for rapid diagnosis of exposure. Accurate, portable sensors that detect human and environmental poisons [pdf, 101kb] are a major step closer, thanks to developmental work performed using resources at the Department of Energy's EMSL.
Atom-level study shows how methanol interacts with catalyst. With sophisticated computer simulations done at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Institute for Interfacial Catalysis and Southern Illinois University showed how an inexpensive metal oxide catalyst can decompose methanol to produce hydrogen [pdf, 100kb].
Identifying the thousands of proteins in a cell could become easier, thanks to a new approach developed by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Department of Energy's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory. This approach accurately identifies proteins and their modifications with high confidence and low ambiguity.
Congratulations to Zhenrong Zhang of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on being selected as the 2007 recipient of M.T. Thomas Award for Outstanding Postdoctoral Achievement.
An international research team shed light on the ribosomal protein S17E from the archaeal thermophilic anaerobe Methanobacterium thermoautotrophicum by determining the protein's structure. The team conducted this research using data acquired on EMSL's nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers.
The creation of climate-changing organic aerosols is not accelerated over megacities, states a recent study aided by instruments from the Department of Energy's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory.
Diverse bacteria have much in common, right down to the core. Using a peptide database collected at the Department of Energy's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory—six years in the making, comprising approximately 967,000 peptides, and linked to protein and gene data—researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory discovered a group of proteins that are shared and commonly expressed by a wide variety of different bacteria. Called the "core proteome," the ubiquitous nature of this group of proteins suggests that they are fundamental to bacterial life.
On April 28, 2008, 25,000 square feet of new office space at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory was dedicated to the memory of Professor J. Mike White, a Robert A. Welch Chair of Materials Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, founding Director of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Institute for Interfacial Catalysis, and distinguished EMSL user.
If you've ever struggled to find a message in an overflowing email inbox, you can sympathize with biologists that must sift through volumes of data to unlock secrets to human health, bioenergy, and environmental remediation. The new Biological Mass Spectrometry Data and Software Distribution Center helps biologists by providing free software to make data sorting easier.
Zachery Oestreicher, a user of the Department of Energy's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study protein-mineral/bacterial-mineral interactions in Japan this summer.
Metal-reducing bacteria grown in the presence of sulfur and arsenic proved the right combination to produce nanotubes with the chemical properties of metals and semiconductors, giving promise for their application as novel nano- and opto-electronic devices.
If the Flintstones had electricity, their wires might have been made of rock. Results in Science Express [March 6, 2008] show that hematite can conduct electrons under certain chemical conditions.
EMSL user Bill Weber was selected as an inaugural Materials Research Society Fellow. He was honored for his "seminal contributions, leadership, mentoring and innovative research on defects, defect properties, ion-solid interactions, radiation effects and models of radiation damage processes in glasses and ceramics."
Julia Laskin, Omar Hadjar, and Peng Wang, users of EMSL, show that the science of softly depositing small proteins on a surface is both beautiful and informative. The images they provided for an invited review article grace a cover of the February 28, 2008, issue of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.
Using EMSL, sceintists determine the crystal structure of a protein from the blue-green bacteria, Cyanothece.
Paul Tratnyek, a member of EMSL's User Advisory Committee and a professor in the department of environmental and biomolecular systems at Oregon Health and Science University's OGI School of Science and Engineering, has received a 2007 OHSU Faculty Senate Award.
EMSL researcher Yanwen Zhang has been invited by the National Academy of Engineering to attend the 2008 German-American Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.
A new technology, discovered by EMSL users, may halt water treatment filter plugs by preventing a bacterial slime that fouls the filter.
Electrons spur the chemical reaction between hydrochloric acid and ammonia, users from the Department of Energy's EMSL announced in a February 2008 cover article in Science. The findings may help scientists precisely control the chemistry in systems contained in hydrogen-powered cars.
Screening for people that might have type 1 diabetes could eventually be more reliable thanks to five proteins discovered by users at EMSL. The proteins could help predict type 1, or insulin-dependent, diabetes with higher sensitivity and specificity than current methods, which can vary considerably among testing laboratories.
Like waltzing dancers, the two atoms of an oxygen molecule usually behave identically when they separate on the surface of a catalyst. However, new research from EMSL reveals that on titanium dioxide, the oxygen atoms act like a couple dancing the tango: one oxygen atom plants itself while the other move away, probably with energy partially stolen from the stationary one.
Markus Raschke, an Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory user from the University of Washington, has received a prestigious Career Award from the National Science Foundation.
Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory researcher Theva Thevuthasan was appointed Chair of the Short Course Executive Committee for AVS: Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing.
Don Baer, Laboratory Fellow and EMSL Lead Scientist for Interfacial Chemistry, was elected to a third term as Chair of the ASTM International Committee E42 on Surface Analysis.
EMSL user Bruce D. Kay was appointed to the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee
EMSL user Professor Gerard F. R. Parkin received the 2008 American Chemical Society Award in Organometallic Chemistry in recognition of his recent achievements in developing models for the active sites of zinc enzymes.
Written by EMSL users, an article on a new nanotechnology-based method for measuring blood glucose was selected as a highly cited paper by Thomson ISI's Essential Science Indicators.
EMSL's Steve Wiley has been invited to write a monthly column for The Scientist. The column will consist of Wiley's thoughts and opinions about life sciences.
Both EMSL computational and experimental resources were employed by researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to develop a method to understand the structure-function relationships in proteins.
EMSL researcher Mark Engelhard was appointed Publications Committee Chair for AVS: Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing.
EMSL's Ken Beck received the U.S. Coast Guard Achievement Award for enabling maritime patrols to reliably communicate in the gullies and gorges of the Columbia and Snake rivers.
An article written by EMSL users and collaborators that describes how many common microorganisms create nanowires to transfer electrons was named a hot paper by ISI's Essential Science Indicators in January 2008. Hot papers are selected because they are cited numerous times within just 2 years of publication.
Integration of computational and experimental photoelectron resources has enabled aromaticity research by EMSL users, leading to a cover in a January 2008 issue of PCCP.
NWChem Version 5.1 is now available to users.
A feature article authored by EMSL users and staff members was published in the The Journal of Physical Chemistry A. The article, "Kinetic Study of Heterogeneous Reaction of Deliquesced NaCl Particles with Gaseous HNO₃ Using Particle-on-Substrate Stagnation Flow Reactor Approach," was written by Yong Liu and Alexander Laskin of EMSL, and Jeremy Cain and Hai Wang of the University of Southern California.
Scientists from the University of California at Irvine, EMSL and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are shining a spotlight on previously unrecognized processes that produce secondary organic aerosols , which are a significant fraction of the atmospheric aerosol mass. Because little is known about the formation of SOAs, the measured and predicted levels differ by an order of magnitude, stymieing research on how to control these aerosols to mitigate their environmental impact.

2007

EMSL user Michel Dupuis was elected Fellow in the American Physical Society.
EMSL users Desmond Smith and Dick Smith shared the honor of being named to the 2007 Scientific American 50 list in January 2008. Assembled by Scientific American's Board of Editors, the list honors 50 outstanding people or teams for their achievements and leadership in shaping established and emerging technologies.
Scientists need to rethink the way they model atmospheric organic aerosols and their impact on global and regional climate change, given the recent findings of EMSL users from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, University of Washington, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This team, led by Rahul Zaveri of PNNL's Atmospheric Science and Global Change Division, found a discrepancy in the semi-empirical approach commonly used in global models to simulate organic aerosols.
Longtime EMSL user Dick Smith was elected to a 3-year term on the Council of the Human Proteome Organisation . Smith was elected to the Council, the organization's governing body, at the HUPO World Congress in Seoul, South Korea, in October 2007.
Greg Exarhos, a frequent user of EMSL, was elected President of AVS : Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing.
Long-time EMSL user Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor from Washington State University, was appointed to the 2008 Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Physical Chemistry.
EMSL users from the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have used the 900-MHz NMR to generate the highest resolution spectra ever obtained of a common catalyst support and observed, for the first time, how the support interacts with a catalyst at the atomic scale.
Fung Suong Ou, a graduate student who investigated a new method of building nanowires at Rice University, received a prestigious nanotechnology award from the Foresight Nanotech Institute in October at the Productive Nanosystems Conference in Arlington, Virginia. Ou conducted nanotechnology research at EMSL as part of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Summer Research Institute, where he was mentored by EMSL's Don Baer and Lax Saraf.
Satyanarayana Kuchibhatla, a graduate student from Professor Sudipta Seal's group at University of Central Florida who is conducting research at EMSL, received an AVS Graduate Research Award for 2007 .
EMSL user Julia Laskin received the U.S. government's highest honor for researchers at the beginning of their careers when she accepted the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House on November 1. A senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Laskin was honored for her work in fundamental reaction kinetics and ion surface reactions conducted at EMSL.
EMSL Chief Technology Officer Dave Koppenaal and five EMSL users were awarded the distinction of 2007 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The lead investigator of EMSL's Membrane Biology Grand Challenge was installed in early October as a George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor of Biology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Nearly 200 staff and users of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) and their families helped the national scientific user facility commemorate 10 years of world-leading science. The celebration took place on September 28 and coincided with the announcement of contract award to HP for delivery of EMSL's next-generation supercomputer.
HP has been selected to deliver to EMSL a new $24-million supercomputer that will help users of the national scientific user facility advance molecular science in areas such as aerosol formation, bioremediation, catalysis, climate change, hydrogen storage, and subsurface science.
A research team composed of scientists from EMSL, Idaho National Laboratory, and Wichita State University is uniting theory, computation, and experiment to discover exactly how heavy elements, such as uranium and technetium , interact in their environment.
Alice Dohnalkova, an expert microscopist from EMSL, received the Diatome Award during the national meeting of the Microscopy Society of America on August 8 in Fort Lauderdale. The award recognizes distinguished scientists who present new and enlightening work in the field of microscopy.
EMSL user Alex Punnoose, a physics professor at Boise State University (BSU), received the 2007 Boise State University College of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Award for Distinguished Research—the first BSU professor to receive both awards in the same year. In addition, Punnoose was named winner of the university's 16^th Foundation Scholar Award for Research and Creativity.
EMSL is playing an important role in understanding atmospheric processes in the Arctic. EMSL user Laura Alvarez-Aviles, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is using EMSL staff expertise and state-of-the-art instruments to determine the importance of aerosol surfaces in Arctic atmospheric chemistry.
Representatives from the University of Manchester visited EMSL on July 23 and 24 to evaluate EMSL as a model for how the university will design and operate its new user facility.
A research team from EMSL, PNNL, and the University of Idaho has used room-temperature methods, instead of traditional high temperature methods, to create metallic-iron nanoparticles with varying shapes. The research was featured on the cover of the June 25, 2007, issue of Nanotechnology.
EMSL user Valérie Copié, a researcher at Montana State University, and her team have determined an unusual protein three-dimensional structure from nuclear magnetic resonance spectra generated in EMSL's High-Field Magnetic Resonance Facility.
EMSL's nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry capabilities have played a role in helping researchers study direct conversion of natural sugars to an alternative source for plastic, fuels, and other industrial and household chemicals. Results of the research were reported in Science (316:1597-1600).
EMSL expertise and instrumentation are helping to support an atmospheric field campaign in Oklahoma that seeks a better understanding of how aerosols affect cloud properties, such as water concentration and droplet size distributions. The campaign is also studying how clouds affect properties of aerosols like chemical composition and location in the atmosphere.
At the invitation of the National Academies, Roy Gephart, Scientific Facility Lead of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory's Chemistry and Physics of Complex Systems Facility, will participate in a workshop on radiation contamination and remediation issues in the former Soviet Union.
Resources at the Department of Energy's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory will help support a $27.5-million dollar effort by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to investigate the movement of contaminated groundwater at sites in Richland, Washington, and Rifle, Colorado.
EMSL researcher Shuttha Shutthanandan was named recipient of the 2007 Fitzner/Eberhardt Award for Outstanding Contributions to Science and Engineering Education.
Nearly 175 staff from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory celebrated the first permanent expansion of EMSL at a January 10 ribbon-cutting. The event celebrated nearly 4,000 square feet of new floor space in the user facility's supercomputing operations area.
Using EMSL's state-of-the-art mass spectrometry capabilities, researchers successfully conducted one of the largest proteomic studies of the vaccinia virus , a poxvirus nearly identical to smallpox and used as a vaccine to prevent the sometimes fatal disease.

2006

Researchers have used sophisticated bioinformatics methods and state-of-the-art proteomic instrumentation at EMSL to identify potential biomarkers for virulence in the plague-causing bacterium, Yersinia pestis.
Five scientific researchers as well as current and past users of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, all from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, were named 2006 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .
Spintronics research conducted in part at EMSL was highlighted on the cover of the November 2006 issue of Materials Today. As part of the research, EMSL researchers and their collaborators seek to answer the question: "Is it possible to create magnetic semiconductors that work at room temperature?" This is one of 125 critical unanswered questions recently posed in Science Magazine.
Lai-Sheng Wang, a long-time EMSL user, has received the prestigious Humboldt Research Award for his lifetime achievements in nanoscience. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation presents up to 100 of these awards annually and invites the recipients to conduct research in Germany for 6 months to 1 year.
In October, EMSL awarded computing time on its 11.8-teraflop supercomputer to 18 collaborative research groups that submitted proposals under the user facility's Computational Grand Challenge program.
Three portable mass spectrometers that are part of EMSL's suite of state-of-the-art research instruments played an important role in a study of hydrocarbons and aerosols in the atmosphere during a recent field campaign in Houston.
A new version of the Extensible Computational Chemistry Environment software (Version 4.0) was released that adds full end-to-end support for the molecular dynamics module in NWChem.
A team of researchers from the University of Texas Health Center at Houston, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has used EMSL's state-of-the-art proteomic tools to study the environmentally important bacterium, Rhodobacter sphaeroides . The results of the research have been reported in the Journal of Proteome Research [5(8):1940-1947] and Journal of Microbiological Methods (in press).
EMSL software developers have released a new version (5.0) of the premier computational chemistry software, NWChem .
EMSL scientist Jim Follansbee was honored by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as the first-ever Cognizant Space Manager of the Year .
Researchers from EMSL and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, along with scientists from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, are studying the biomolecular mechanisms of the S. oneidensis and uranium interaction . This research is being performed, in part, under the EMSL Biogeochemistry Scientific Grand Challenge.
Use of EMSL state-of-the-art mass spectrometry capabilities have allowed researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and their collaborators to research the precise connection between oxidative stress and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Lou Gehrig's diseases.
Yanwen Zhang, a researcher in EMSL's Interfacial and Nanoscale Science Facility, has been selected for a prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers . Zhang is the second researcher to receive this honor since the award was instituted in 1996.
Researchers from the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) were introduced to the state-of-the-art instruments at EMSL during a 3-day tour of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) . The visit was part of an effort of the CAS and PNNL to form a collaborative research.
A biofuel composed of pure soy mixed with diesel fuel has been introduced as an alternative fuel source to natural gas for the boilers and backup generators at EMSL. Use of the biofuel makes the scientific user facility the first and only DOE facility in the nation to target this type of fuel for use on a large scale.

2005

2004

Contact: Mary Ann Showalter | mary.ann.showalter@pnl.gov, 509-371-6017