The biggest scientific project in more than 30 years is taking place at the University of Saskatchewan and when it’s complete, it is expected to create a wave of agricultural research in Canada that includes livestock applications.
Imagine swinging a steel yo-yo above your head faster and faster, until it almost catches up with itself as it nears the speed of light. Now replace the string with a vacuum tube and use two dozen giant magnets, repelling and attracting and bending the path ofthe yo-yo to keep it running in a three-acre circle.
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Now replace the yo-yo with electrons and keep them hurtling through the tube at high speed. Speed them up by letting them surf on an even faster moving set of radio waves. Now let some of them escape the curving tube and magnetic field and fly off in a straight line as a beam of light, a “beam line,” millions of times brighter than the sun.
These tiny particles, moving at near unimaginable speed, fly off and pass through flesh, bone or even a kernel of grain. So tiny and so fast are the electrons that they don’t disturb the objects that they’re passing through.
On the other side of the object or experiment is a computer sensor that records information in the same manner as X-ray film might.
If you can imagine all of this, you can imagine a synchrotron.
Unlike typical X-rays, the electrons are moving so fast they can pass almost distortion-free through nearly any target material. The results are clear images of the inner workings of just about anything, from the nerves in a horse’s leg to the fibre structure of an oats hull, to single proteins and cells.
To scientists who will be using the Canadian Light Source facility in Saskatoon, this means they can examine living tissue or experimental materials in ways that weren’t previously possible in Canada.
Many scientific tests must destroy research material to analyze its contents. Material is crushed, blended into a liquid or burnt at high temperatures. Those tests can’t be repeated because the material is gone.
But with the synchrotron, the test subject is unaffected. Tests can be repeated, modified and multiple tests can be done using different types of light and computer models. Tests can be layered like so many X-ray films stacked one on top of another, each adding new information. And material can be saved for future examination, important for living tissue.
Kathleen Gough of the University of Manitoba is on the facility’s team.
She said an important feature of infrared spectromicroscopy is the capability to study tissue without having to stain the image.
“Normally we might have to wash samples or treat them with solvents. Nothing is added or taken away from our samples with the synchrotron. It makes better science, faster.”
Advanced radiation therapy for humans and animals is possible as well using the synchrotron, but researchers expect the facility will mainly be used to create images.
If all this sounds complicated, it is.
Bill Thomlinson, who heads the facility, said the highly technical construction was mostly done by Saskatchewan companies.
“Even if I and the beam team have to back up all the way into Manitoba to fire it up for first tests, it will be running by December.”
Thomlinson was joking about the reach but not about the date. Scientists from around the world are starting to apply for time on the Canadian Light Source beam, but Canadian researchers have priority. Fees from corporations will cover some of the operating costs of the giant lab as they buy time on a portion of the synchrotron’s schedule. Money will also arrive in the form of grants from various levels of government and other research institutions.
“Saskatchewan is a great place to locate the (lab),” Thomlinson said.
“It is cheap for scientists to travel to and stay the few weeks or more they might come. Japan, for instance, has a (synchrotron) but it is underutilized as a result of high costs to travel and stay there.”
Those co-ordinating research projects from the plant, animal and physical sciences departments at the universities of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the so-called beam team, speak with excitement about the $173.5 million facility.
Greg Adams of the U of S Western College of Veterinary Medicine is part of the beam team.
“The first prion identified in England was done on a synchrotron,” said Adams, speaking to the Canadian Science Writers Association annual meeting in June.
“BSE and CWD instances are accompanied by an accumulation of heavy metals and a synchrotron can be used to identify (them).”
The eventual construction of the $17 million “biomedical beam line” will allow him and other animal science researchers to look at the “basic molecular level protein structures to macroscopic views of organs, tendons, other tissues in ways we couldn’t before.”
The biomedical line will create a fan-like array beam able to pass electrons through a 20 centimetre wide object. The catch is that to get a spread of electrons that wide, the distance from the central ring needs to be 55 metres.
“At 55 m long, and needing some specialized equipment for live animal handling, it is going to cost some money. But it will happen,” said Adams.
He said the prospect of advanced genetics and disease analysis on the various end-stations of the beam lines will not only advance research that will be useful in livestock production, but will attract researchers to the university.
The impact of the synchrotron cannot be overstated when it comes to attracting staff, said Bryan Harvey, acting vice-president of research at the U of S.
“There is the potential to attract a class of researchers (professors) who would see having relatively easy access to a synchrotron as an important career decision. And the school would benefit from that,” he said.
Crops, too, will be under the microscopic light of the Canadian Light Source.
Peipiang Yu, of the department of animal and poultry science at the U of S, said worldwide there has been little use of synchrotrons to study crop tissues as they relate to livestock feed, but that is about to change.
“It isn’t just whether one chemical or another is in a seed or even its quantity. It can be its location, structure, its composition, the way it is stored. All affect the way it is broken down in the stomach,” he said.
“When we do a wet test, it destroys all of this information.”
Yu’s study earlier this year of malting versus feed types of barley at a New York synchrotron unearthed the reason why barleys such as Harrington break down more rapidly in animal rumens, causing digestive problems more often than feed types such as Valier.
He found that feed barley varieties store their starches in close contact with their proteins, which he believes slows the breakdown.
“With wet tests we never would find that detail. When we breed a plant for one feature or another, we will be able to see what to look for structurally during selection by using the (synchrotron),” he said.
Not only will the synchrotron be used for diagnosis and research, but it will help manufacturers and developers of drug delivery technologies. Saskatoon scientist David Klyumyshyn and his company TRLabs said it becomes a tool shop, making such things as dies to produce “nano needles” for medicinal skin patches.
“This facility is big for ag research. This will be big for Canadian research on the whole,” said Thomlinson.
