Dominik Dziura (BSc 2022) says his study abroad trip to the neutron scattering facility at the Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble, France, helped advance his membrane research.

Neutron scattering is a powerful tool that can study matter at microscopic levels.

The graduate student received a Canada Graduate Scholarship - Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement (CGS-MSFSS) which he turned into a three-month exchange at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research in the United States.

As a Masters student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Dziura works in professor Drew Marquardt’s lab on lipid membrane research. When he worked at NIST, he collaborated with instrument scientist Elizabeth Kelley. For their work they needed to use a small angle neutron diffractometer, but the reactor at NIST was down, so the team travelled to the ILL research institute in France for two weeks.

“With Dr. Kelley’s neutron scattering expertise I was able to learn more about the techniques, including collecting data and modelling,” says Dziura.

“Neutron scattering is a really good technique to look at biology in real time and membranes in real time because you’re able to probe super small structures and learn information based off that.”

Dziura says he is working on two main research projects, the first looking at the antioxidant Vitamin E.

“Vitamin E moves within membranes. It is an antioxidant and protects the membranes from oxidation. We’re looking at how its movement throughout the membranes can explain its antioxidative protection,” he says.

Using neutron scattering, he says, relies on neutron contrast and based on how we change the system we can look at specific components.

“With Vitamin E, everything is invisible to the neutron except the Vitamin E when it scatters and based on how it scatters. Based on how the intensity of scattering changes over time, you could relate that to the kinetics of the movement and determine the half-life of this process.”

He is also interested in the structural arrangements of membranes which are composed of different lipids. Natural cell membranes are asymmetric but synthetic membranes, which are models used to study membranes, are symmetric. Dziura wants to help create better synthetic models that are asymmetric.

Both research projects were advanced thanks to his time spent with experts at NIST and ILL.

“It comes down to their expertise and having those opportunities to work with them, not just Dr. Kelley, but there is a plethora of researchers at NIST and ILL — top-end scientists in the field of neutron scattering,” he says.

“For example, I learned how to code a program to process my data in large batches quickly. They have access to resources that we don’t have here.”