X-ray Generator Fits In the Palm of Your Hand

ananyo writes "Scientists have reported the first tabletop source of ultra-short, laser-like pulses of low energy, or 'soft,' X-rays. The light, capable of probing the structure and dynamics of molecules (abstract), was previously available only at large, billion-dollar national facilities such as synchrotrons or free-electron lasers, where competition for use of the equipment is fierce. The new device, by husband-and-wife team Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn based at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, might soon lie within the grasp of a university laboratory budget — perhaps allowing them to one day be as common in labs as electron microscopes are."

How time flies

[overshoot]

perhaps allowing them to one day be as common in labs as electron microscopes are.

<mode="geezer">
And back in my day, electron microscopes were big-ticket gear that only a few big labs could afford.
Now, get off of my lawn!
</mode

Re:Proteome

[Naffer]

Not to mention that home X-ray sources have improved dramatically over the last few decades. I think if you've got enough cash Rigaku or Bruker will sell you single or dual wavelength rotating anode sources that would be totally fine for routine protein x-ray crystallography on nicely diffracting samples. Not all protein crystallography needs a synchrotron, since a lot of times people are just doing ligand soaks to try to find small molecule binding modes in protein active sites.

Not crystallography, but holography

[Btrot69]

This is a fully coherent laser -- not just an X-ray source. So, you would not be scattering photons the way crystallography is done -- you would be taking holographic photos of the protein molecules.
And yes, these are soft X-rays now -- but this is and brand new technique, and it appears to be very scaleable. Hard X-rays might not be too far off.