In a paper published in Structure, a team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported the pioneering use of neutron and X-ray crystallography and high performance computing to study how the enzyme D-xylose isomerase, or XI, can cause a biochemical reaction in natural sugar to produce rare sugars. Unlike drugs made

A team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee studied carbon fibers made from lignin, a woody plant polymer known as, and found a mixture of perfectly spherical nanoscale crystallites distributed within a fibrous matrix. They found the lignin fiber’s unique structure could make it useful as a battery anode, potentially improving

Neutron scattering research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has revealed clear structural differences in the normal and pathological forms of a protein involved in Huntington’s disease. Huntington’s disease, an incurable neurodegenerative disorder, starts as a genetic mutation that leads to an overabundance of “huntingtin” protein fragments, which form clumps in the