Neutron scattering is a great experimental tool to probe dynamics in biological systems as it can measure directly the fluctuation of nucleus positions. The scattering always involves incoherent (self-motions of atoms) and coherent (interatomic motions) signals, and the incoherent scattering cross section of hydrogen atoms is at least one order magnitude larger than the scattering cross sections of other elements. Most neutron scattering experiments performed so far on protein systems used hydrogenated samples, and are thus limited to the dynamics of self-motions of hydrogen atoms in the bio-macromolecules. Here, by performing neutron scattering on high quality of fully deuterated protein samples, we are able to characterize the interatomic motions among protein heavy atoms, particularly the backbone motions in the biomacromolecules [1,2], which has not been explored much in the past.

References:

[1] L. Hong, N. Jain, X. Cheng, A. Bernal, M. Tyagi, and J. C. Smith, “Determination of functional collective motions in a protein at atomic resolution using coherent neutron scattering,” Sci. Adv., Vol. 2, no. 10, e1600886, pp. 1–8, 14 Oct 2016.

[2] Zhuo Liu, Juan Huang, Madhusudan Tyagi, Hugh O’Neill, Qiu Zhang, Eugene Mamontov, Nitin Jain, Yujie Wang, Jie Zhang, Jeremy C. Smith, and Liang Hong, “Dynamical Transition of Collective Motions in Dry Proteins”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119 (2017), 048101.

Dr. Hong got his bachelor degree in physics from University of Science and Technology of China in 2004. Then, He went to Chinese University of Hong Kong to pursue a Master degree also in physics, where he got intensively exposed to scientific research in the areas of synthesizing semiconducting nano-materials and characterizing their optical and structural properties. Two years later, He got admitted to the PhD program in polymer science at the University of Akron, where he worked with Prof. Alexei P. Sokolov on the topic of glass transition in polymers, small molecule systems and proteins. He got his PhD diploma in three and a half years and then went over to Oak Ridge National lab to work with Prof. Jeremy C. Smith as a Postdoc on the projects of combining computer simulation and neutron scattering to study protein dynamics, structure and function. Research interests: Dynamics in Soft-condensed Matters including Polymers, Proteins, Biomass and Bio-membranes.