• Number 343  |
• August 8, 2011

$2 million upgrade to Lilly's APS beamline

Eli Lilly and Company and DOE's Argonne National Laboratory announced the completion of Lilly's $2 million upgrade to the company's research-guided beamline, located at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne's campus outside of Chicago. The APS is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated by Argonne.

The Lilly Research Laboratories Collaborative Access Team (LRL-CAT) beamline is a sophisticated X-ray analytical facility that produces detailed, atom-by-atom pictures of protein crystals. Its operations rely on the high-quality X-rays generated by the APS, one of the most powerful sources of X-rays for research purposes worldwide.

The data produced by the beamline and interpreted by LRL scientists provide valuable information on the interactions between potential new medicines and human disease protein targets. Lilly chemists, structural biologists, and the staff at the LRL-CAT X-ray beamline facility work together to create molecules, prepare crystals and analyze how the molecules bind to the proteins. The process is iterative, initially using beamline data to design new potential medicines with enhanced properties, which are in turn introduced into protein crystals and then re-analyzed.

[Jared Sagoff, 630.252.5549,
jsagoff@anl.gov]