91����

As the old saying goes: if you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break open some eggs.

For 91���� Professor of Biology and Biomedical Engineering Joseph Orgel, the prospect of discovering prehistoric fragments of dinosaur collagen tissue meant he had no choice but to crack open a fossil from a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Even for a seasoned scientist, that first swing of the hammer into a T-rex fossil was a difficult task to perform.

“It was a problem,” says Orgel. “It took me about three hours of walking away, coming back to it…It’s getting over the mental block; the value is inside.”

The reason behind shattering a dinosaur fossil? Orgel developed an that detected collagenous peptide sequences inside the fossil—something that paleontologists had also found previously, but only when they were forced to saw a T-rex femur in half—and he needed to confirm his findings.

“What we did was take fossil fragments where the collagenous material was not exposed yet,” says Orgel. “The X-ray penetrates through the mineral, and it picks up signal from what's on the inside. Then, I went and did micro-surgery on the fossil and dug out tissue from inside.”

Orgel’s new technique involves firing extremely intense, tightly focused X-ray beams at a sample, then measuring how the beam scatters. Doing this using the synchrotron at Argonne National Laboratory meant a much narrower, more precise beam measured in microns, a substantial improvement when compared to traditional X-ray imaging.

One big challenge when dealing with X-ray diffraction is the signal-to-noise ratio. The more noise, the more random scattering of the X-ray—in contrast to the ordered scattering a researcher would find when the X-ray bounces off the sample. The less noise, the better, which is why using such a precise X-ray beam was necessary. While Orgel only had small fragments of the T-rex fossil, it turned out that’s all he needed with this innovative X-ray technique.

“There’s a trade-off; it is better to have very little material that is very well-ordered than it is to have lots more that is a hodgepodge,” he says. “It’s like drawing something exquisite as a portrait and then deciding to scribble crayon across it.”

With a micron-scale beam, Orgel’s team was able to find tiny islands of order buried deep inside the fossil where the collagen lied.

Orgel is particularly excited about the new questions this discovery poses, as it provides some of the strongest evidence to date that complex biological structures can survive for tens of millions of years, fundamentally challenging classic assumptions. Either scenario would be a profound change for the fields of paleontology and biology.

This powerful application of X-ray imaging is also applicable in a ; Orgel’s team has used this exact approach to study the nanoscopic damage caused by Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). By using a more precise beam, doctors are able to detect damage from TBI that was previously thought to be invisible because they are so deeply embedded in the brain.

“It’s only invisible because you don’t have the resolution to see it,” says Orgel, comparing the previous detection abilities to seeing a black mark on a black background. “It’s only invisible to your eyes because you don’t have a microscope. It’s only invisible to your microscope because you’re using photons of a wavelength that isn’t short enough to see something smaller.”

By increasing the resolution, doctors and researchers are able to better detect and better understand TBIs at a cellular level. In particular, it helps scientists study myelin sheaths that insulate nerve fibers in the brain, helping improve detection and monitoring of TBI.

Moving forward, Orgel is in the final stages of publishing his findings. He’s hoping his innovative X-ray imaging technique will have wide-ranging implications , , and beyond.

“These are sublimely, impossibly difficult problems, but they have tremendous application to the contemporary world,” says Orgel. “I just wanted to put this out there. If I’m right, there’s something not far away that’s probably relevant to a lot of biomedical interests. I should see if anyone else wants to run with it. And it turns out people want to run with it.”