Affluent Activists and New Tactics: The Changing Face of the Chinese Environmental Movement

This article will discuss a shift taking place within the Chinese environmental movement. The work of Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations, the established face of the movement, has been characterized by efforts to work within the constraints set by the government. The emergence of directly confrontational protests led by members of the middle class represents a shift in the movement as a whole. These protests have emerged as the result of the growing level of middle class environmental consciousness and the government’s inadequate response to environmental problems. This is reflected in citizens’ frustration over the lack of government transparency and public consultation. While protests can be perceived as a threat to the careful organization and methodical strategies of ENGOs, both have a role to play in the fight against China’s pollution and environmental degradation

Membrane protein megahertz crystallography at the European XFEL

The world's first superconducting megahertz repetition rate hard X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), the European XFEL, began operation in 2017, featuring a unique pulse train structure with 886 ns between pulses. With its rapid pulse rate, the European XFEL may alleviate some of the increasing demand for XFEL beamtime, particularly for membrane protein serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX), leveraging orders-of-magnitude faster data collection. Here, we report the first membrane protein megahertz SFX experiment, where we determined a 2.9 Å-resolution SFX structure of the large membrane protein complex, Photosystem I, a > 1 MDa complex containing 36 protein subunits and 381 cofactors. We address challenges to megahertz SFX for membrane protein complexes, including growth of large quantities of crystals and the large molecular and unit cell size that influence data collection and analysis. The results imply that megahertz crystallography could have an important impact on structure determination of large protein complexes with XFELs.peerReviewe