Scientists can now fire "frozen" proteins through a vacuum like a high-precision Gatling gun.
April 15, 2026
Original Paper
Controlled beams of cryo-cooled protein-like nanoparticles
arXiv · 2604.09090
The Takeaway
Proteins are the machinery of life, but they're notoriously hard to study because they wiggle and break under observation. Researchers have finally perfected a way to shock-freeze these nanoparticles and shoot them in a dense, controllable beam in the gas phase. Before this, getting individual, perfectly preserved proteins into a beam was nearly impossible without destroying them. This breakthrough allows us to use massive X-ray lasers to snap "photos" of single proteins with atomic precision while they are suspended in mid-air. It’s like finally being able to take a high-speed photo of a bullet to see exactly how it’s made, which could revolutionize how we design drugs and fight diseases.
From the abstract
We report a cryogenic buffer-gas-cell-aerodynamic-lens-stack setup that enables the generation of shock-frozen, dense, and controllable beams of various nanoparticles in the gas phase, including small and low-density species such as isolated proteins. We demonstrate characterization of the setup using strong-field ionization combined with velocity-map imaging, allowing the unambiguous detection of nanoparticles in the protein-size range and full reconstruction of the particle beams including det