“To develop and operate state-of-the-art facilities at the Advanced Photon Source for the study of the structure and dynamics of biological systems under non-crystalline conditions similar to their functional states in living tissues.”
BioCAT is organized as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Biotechnology Research Resource and is funded by the National Institute of General Biomedical Sciences (NIGMS). Its primary research tool is a very high brightness X-ray beam-line with an on-site biochemical preparation laboratory.

The research techniques that BioCAT supports are: Small- and Wide-angle Diffraction from biological fibers, Small- and Wide-angle Scattering (SAXS and WAXS) from macromolecules in solution, and X-ray microprobe imaging.