A new $5 million initiative, funded by the Astera Institute, aims to make diffuse scattering - a signal in X-ray crystallography that reveals protein dynamics - accessible to the public and the broader scientific community. The Cornell participants include chemists Nozomi Ando and Steve Meisburger. Experimental work will be conducted at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS).
Members of the project team that gathered at Astera Institute on June 24, 2025. Nozomi Ando is front row, second from the right; Stephen Meisburger is back row, third from the left.
The goal of The Diffuse Project is to make data collection possible at any crystallography beamline, using software that anyone can use, and to build infrastructure for sharing models of protein dynamics. The work ultimately aims to accelerate AI-driven modeling of how proteins move, which the researchers said could be a step towards understanding protein functions and how they may be better engineered or manipulated.
The team members hope to involve more of the scientific community in the future of structural biology, "where we not only determine how proteins move experimentally but also move beyond static structure prediction to predicting molecular motions," said Ando, professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The Diffuse Project builds on research from the Ando Lab and CHESS mapping protein motion and analyzing protein crystals. For the project the Ando Lab will collect high-quality datasets for the public and create data processing and visualization tools.
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.
