This book the second volume in the "Springer Series in Biophysics" col-
lects together contributions to the conference on "Biophysics and Syn-
chrotron Radiation" held in July 86 at Frascati. This meeting addressed
the advances on the structure of biological molecules obtained by using
synchrotron radiation. In fact it was most timely to review the results
of the research in biophysics which is rapidly developing at synchrotron
radiation facilities. Moreover, there was interest to discuss the new
perspectives opened up by the future high brilliance synchrotron radia-
tion sources. With the use of synchrotron radiation, x-ray spectroscopy
of biological molecules is firmly established in the techniques of EXAFS
and XANES. Contributions to the detailed knowledge of local structure of
active sites of metalloproteins by this approach are presented in this
volume, together with a number of studies of -the interaction of metal
ions with other important biological macromolecular systems. Structural
determination of very large biological systems at high reso- lution,
including a protein and its substrate, are reported. The experi- mental
advances in protein crystallography presented here reduce the time for
solving protein structures, thus satisfying a major require- ment of the
rapidly-expanding field of protein engineering.