Welcome to the European Photon & Neutron Science Campus website

Paris, 15 July - How did Leonardo Da Vinci manage to paint such perfect faces? For the first time a quantitative chemical analysis has been done on seven paintings from the Louvre Museum (including the Mona Lisa) without extracting any samples.

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The complementarity of X-ray and neutron diffraction techniques is again demonstrated by the study of the enzyme D-xylose isomerase (XI) (EC 5.3.1.5), a crucial enzyme in sugar metabolism, with important commercial applications, notably in the production of biofuels and soft-drink sweeteners.

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Three publications of interest to the epn campus scientists have just been released:

• The "ESRFnews"
• The "ILL news"
• The IBS's "Actualités" (science newsletter in French only)

Eva Pebay-Peyroula has been chosen to succeed Jacques Stern as President of the National Research Agency (ANR), the French national funding agency for research projects.
Professor at the University Joseph Fourier, director of the IBS since 2004, CNRS Silver Medal 2005, Mrs Pebay-Peyroula is a member of the Academy of sciences of the Institute of France. Her research focuses on the contribution of structural biology to understand the functions of membrane proteins.

Researchers from the NMR group at the Institut de Biologie Structurale have reported the first direct experimental evidence of biological XH/π interactions, a weak hydrogen bond-like interaction long believed to contribute to biomolecular structure and function. XH/π interactions are weaker than canonical hydrogen bonds and are commonly identified indirectly from high resolution 3D structures.

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Contaminated water causes more than 2 million deaths a year.  Water treatment usually involves chemical coagulants but some, for example aluminium salts, have health implications.  This has led to a search for alternative natural solutions and the most promising is from the Moringa tree. Scientists, in order to develop future treatments from Moringa seeds, need to know exactly what processes take place during the purification. Thanks to the ILL, researchers are now a step closer to understanding how these seeds work.

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Supercooling, a state where liquids do not solidify even below their normal freezing point, still puzzles scientists today. A good example of this phenomenon is found everyday in meteorology: clouds in high altitude are an accumulation of supercooled droplets of water below their freezing point. Scientists from the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA), the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the ESRF have found an experimental explanation of the phenomenon of supercooling...

[Read more on the ESRF site]

In September 2012 a 5000 m2 science building will be built on the campus by the ILL and ESRF. It will be a hive of future projects for the large-scale instruments...

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On 27 November 2009, the Directors of the ILL and the ESRF established this collaboration with the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

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