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01 (↑). Farmers in the Agrocompost project compare the effectiveness of their own compost recipes to commercial brands. | 02 (←). The NEOCOMP project transforms urban waste
into compost. | 03 (→). SUBSED has studied the effect of marine sediments in the trunk, leaves, fruits and even the water left over from the drainage of the trees.

IDiBE have travelled several times to Cerdanyola del Vallès riment you want to perform. If you could measure the space
(Barcelona) to carry out their experiments in these facilities. between the carbon atoms that make up a cell with a very
Synchrotron is sometimes confused with Switzerland’s Lar- small ruler, we would see that they are about 10-10 metres,
ge Hadron Collider (LHC). Actually, they are not the same. At that is, 0.0000000001 metres. This is precisely the wavelen-
the LHC, protons are accelerated to make them collide and gth of the X-rays that electrons can emit in the synchrotron
study their properties, while at ALBA electrons are accele- and, for this reason, they are useful for seeing the interaction
rated to generate light and use this light for other purposes. between the light beams and the molecules that are inside
Since protons are much heavier than electrons, they must the red blood cells of the fish. ALBA has thirteen beamlines.
‘run’ through a much larger circuit to accelerate. Therefore, There, the teams modify the beam to create different types
the LHC has a circumference of 28 kilometres, while the pe- of X-rays according to the experiment to be performed and
rimeter of the facilities in Barcelona is less than 300 meters. then focus it toward the sample.

At ALBA, to generate light, metals are heated to more than a Ana Joaquina Pérez Berna, a graduate in Biochemistry and
thousand degrees Celsius until their electrons have enough a PhD in Molecular Biology at the UMH, is one of the scien-
energy to detach themselves from the material. Then, elec- tists in charge of these beamlines of the ALBA Synchrotron.
tric fields are used to drive electrons at near-light speeds in “The projects that come to MISTRAL have gone through an
a straight section, and then injected into a propelling ring. It international committee, and for me it was a great joy to see
would be like a velodrome. that the project of the UMH had been chosen. Having scien-
tists of the UMH as users is a real pleasure”, says the resear-
But it is not called a velodrome or simply an electron accele- cher. In particular, Ana Joaquina Pérez manages the experi-
rator because the key to the matter is that, for its light to be ments of the line MISTRAL in which biological samples can
useful, it has to be stable and always have the same proper- be analysed. “There are only four lines of light like MISTRAL
ties. This is achieved by synchronising the impulse and the ro- in the world where we can perform X-ray cryotomography”,
tation speed of the electrons. Hence its name: synchrotrons. explains the expert. This technique enables accessing the
cells and visualising their interior in 3D. They can see the
Throughout this synchronised race, the light emitted by the changes that a virus causes in the cell during infection,
electrons is captured and modified depending on the expe- study viral factories, and understand which organelles are

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