Thomas C. Irving Professor of Biology Director, Center for Synchrotron Radiation Research and Instrumentation Director, BioCAT
	B.Sc.:	University of Guelph
	Ph.D.:	University of Guelph
	Office:	388 Life Sciences Building
	Phone:	312.567.3489       Fax:  312.567.3494
	e-mail:	thomas.irving@iit.edu

Professional Interests

My research interests focus on the use of biophysical techniques to study the molecular basis for muscle physiology. My major research tool is small-angle X-ray diffraction which I use to study the ordered structures in muscle on the nm length scale. The big advantage of this technique over say, electron microsocopy, is that it can be used on muscle under hydrated, physiological conditions, and even in the living state. The molecular events responsible for muscle contraction occur on time scales of a hundred microseconds to a few hundred milliseconds. To obtain diffraction information on this time scale requires extremely intense beams of X-rays, up to a million times more intense than obtainable in the laboratory. To obtain such beams, a major part of my R&D efforts go towards developing the BioCAT project, an NIH funded X-ray diffraction facility at the Advanced Photon Source located at Argonne National labs, for a national and international community of users. This facility is arguably one of the best in the world for muscle studies.

One of my main research areas is the study of the molecular basis of the Frank-Starling law of the heart, with collaborations with collaboration with Prof. P. DeTombe, University of Illinois at Chicago, H. Granzier, Washington State Universty and R. Moss, U. Wisconsin, Madison. Another ongoing project is studies of insect flight muscle from living normal and mutant fruit flies during tethered flight, a collaboration with Dr. D. Maughan, University of Vermont and Michael Dickinson, Caltech. Other collaborative projects are time resolved studies of working crossbridges in active crossbridges (with H.E. Huxley, Brandeis University, V. Lombardi, University of Florence) and structural studies of the filament lattice of the giant waterbug, Lethocerus (with M.K. Reedy, Duke University)

Representative Publications

• Colson, B.A., Bekyarova, T., Irving, T.C., and Moss, R.L. Radial displacement of myosin cross-bridges in mouse myocardium due to ablation of myosin binding protein-C. J. Mol. Biol. 367, 36–41
  
  
• Michael Dickinson, Gerrie Farman, Mark Frye, Tanya Bekyarova, David Gore, David Maughan and Thomas C. Irving. Molecular Dynamics of Cyclically Contracting Insect Flight Muscle. Nature 433:330-333
  
  
• R. Fischetti, S. Stepanov, G. Rosenbaum, R. Barrea, D. Gore, R. Heurich, E. Kondrashkina, S. Wang, Ke Zhang, T.C. Irving and G.B. Bunker. The BioCAT Undulator Beamline 18ID: A Facility for Biological Non-Crystalline Diffraction and X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy at the Advanced Photon Source. Journal of Synchrotron Radiation,11:399-405.
  
  
• T.C. Irving, J. Konhilas, D. Perry, R. Fischetti, and P.P. deTombe. Lattice spacings in skinned rat trabeculae as a function of sarcomere length in rat myocardium. Am. J. of Physiol. 279:H2568-H2573.
  
  
• Irving, T.C. 1998. A bright future for non-crystalline diffraction using synchrotron radiation. Nature Structural Biology, 5:Synchrotron Supplement, August 1998.
  
  

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