IN13 backscattering Spectrometer at ILL: looking for motions in biological macromolecules and organisms

In 1998, three partner groups (the French institutions Institut de Biologie Structurale and the Léon Brillouin Laboratory and the Italian Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, now merged with the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, INFM-CNR) applied to operate the thermal backscattering spectrometer IN13, at the Institut Laue Langevin, as a French-Italian Collaborative Research Group (CRG). The plan was to have access to a dedicated spectrometer in order to explore how far neutron scattering could contribute to the understanding of dynamics in biological macromolecules: how "flexible" must be a biological object to perform its function? First experimental results were obtained demonstrating the possibility of quantifying the dynamics in various biological systems, from the isolated protein to the entire cells. Rapidly, an increasing number of research groups manifested their interest to participate.