Professor Janos Hajdu receives the 2021 Gregori Aminoff Prize. Credit: KVA, Markus Marcetic

Professor Janos Hajdu of Uppsala University received the 2021 Gregori Aminoff Prize from the hands of Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf on Monday the 13th of June. Due to the pandemic, the Aminoff Prize winners from the last three years were honoured together at the ceremony in Stockholm’s City Hall where the annual Nobel Prize banquet is also held.

Hajdu, who also works at the European Extreme Light Infrastructure near Prague, was awarded the Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences together with Henry Chapman from DESY/Hamburg University and John Spence from Arizona State University for their “Explosive Studies of Biological Macromolecules”. John Spence passed away in June 2021.

Hajdu and Chapman were joined by the prize winners of 2020, Douglas C. Rees from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Jian-Ren Shen from Okayama University in Japan, and 2022, Elena Conti from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Planegg, Patrick Cramer from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, and Seth Darst from Rockefeller University in New York.

The Aminoff Prize, named after the Swedish mineralogist Gregori Aminoff, has been awarded since 1979 for outstanding achievements in crystallography. The award ceremony takes place at the annual celebration of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

Homepage of the Gregori Aminoff Prize at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Tomas Ekeberg has been portrayed in the most recent edition of “Curie”, the web magazine from the Swedish Research Council.

Here’s the link to the article (in Swedish).

Janos Hajdu, together with Henry Chapman, Professor at Hamburg University and John Spence, Professor at Arizona State University, was awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences the 2021 Aminoff Prize “for their fundamental contributions to the development of X-ray free-electron laser based structural biology”.

More information can be found in the Academy’s press release.

Our article with the title “The role of transient resonances for ultra-fast imaging of single sucrose nanoclusters” (doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13905-9) has been published in Nature Communications.

Our article with the title “Electrospray sample injection for single-particle imaging with x-ray lasers” (doi:10.1126/sciadv.aav8801) has been published in Science Advances.

We have several job openings available. Please check biox.io for details!

Background artifact

Following the publication of our latest article, “Considerations for three-dimensional image reconstruction from experimental data in coherent diffractive imaging”, on IUCrJ, Changyong Song has written an insightful commentary on it.

International collaboration obtains the first scientific results from European XFEL

Artistic presentation of the experiment: When the ultra-bright X-ray flashes (violet) the enzyme crystals in the water jet (blue) can be reconstructed from this fluoroscopy the three-dimensional form of the enzyme (right). Image: DESY / Lucid Berlin

An international collaboration, consisting of over 120 researchers, has announced the results of the first scientific experiments at Europe’s new X-ray free-electron laser, called the European XFEL. This first study reveals a previously unknown structure of an enzyme, responsible for antibiotics resistance. “The ground-breaking work of the first team to use the European XFEL has paved the way for all users of the facility who greatly benefit from these pioneering experiments,” emphasises European XFEL managing director Robert Feidenhans’l. “We are very pleased – these first results show that the facility is ready to deliver new scientific breakthroughs.” The scientists present their results, including the first new protein structure solved at the European XFEL, in the journal Nature Communications.
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