The Photon Factory opened its first dedicated protein crystallography beamline with a Weissenberg camera in the mid-1980s. Prof. Ada Yonath, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for her work on the structure-function analysis of ribosomes, was working at the Photon Factory at this time. The cryo-crystallography developed at the time led to the successful structural analysis.
Read more about the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and KEK’s Photon Factory here: KEK feature article
Image: Cryo-cooling system developed by Prof. Ada Yonath installed at the Photon Factory
Credit: Photo courtesy of Prof. Noriyoshi Sakabe