Advancing Life Sciences with Diamond-II

Diamond Light Source is an essential UK resource enabling both academic and industrial research experiments in areas as diverse as aircraft engineering, surface science, battery research, chemistry and catalysis, quantum materials and the life sciences.

For biomedical research Diamond is indispensable to structural investigations that reveal the fundamental mechanisms of life and disease in atomic detail and at the cellular and molecular level.

To date Diamond has impacted areas including drug discovery, fundamental cancer research, antimicrobial resistance, vaccine design, enzyme engineering and research into age related illnesses, plant science and agriculture.

Diamond-II comprises a long-term major upgrade to the storage ring, greatly increasing the beam brightness and the electron beam energy from 3 to 3.5 GeV.

The 10-year programme will also deliver five new beamlines, a substantial upgrade to computational resource for user data and analysis, and dark period mitigating beamline capacity for Diamond’s most demanding and productive user community.

This will enormously enhance Diamond’s existing capabilities in both physical and life science, and, in biomedical research, will introduce powerful new techniques both for the structural investigation of large sample volumes to provide context to cellular and molecular studies and for dynamic studies of life at the microsecond level.