Biological systems chemical biology, probe tools

X-ray absorption spectroscopy is an exciting new tool, ideally suited to probing the immediate environment of a specific atom type in a physical, chemical or biological system. The advent of synchrotron radiation has transformed this technique from a topic of relatively minor interest to one of major scientific importance and activity " . A major attraction of the technique is the possibility it provides of probing a reaction centre in a wide range of materials ranging from an industrial catalyst to an enzyme the technique is not limited by the physical state of the sample. In this review, suitability of this technique for biochemical systems is discussed. 

Pump-probe diffraction techniques offer exciting new ways to probe transient structures in molecular, nanoscale, and biological systems. For dilute systems, or very small targets, electron diffraction is the preferred tool, because the cross sections for scattering of electrons from molecules are very large. In our research we show that pump-probe electron diffraction is an excellent technique to probe the dynamics of chemical reactions in the rarified environment of jet expansions, and for probing the diffraction signatures of individually excited vibronic states. 

Diversity-Oriented Synthesis Developing New Chemical Tools to Probe and Modulate Biological Systems... 

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