Illinois Institute of Technology Professor Joseph Orgel has developed a new application of micron-scale X-ray imaging to study ancient biological material and traumatic brain injuries. Orgel’s work began with a challenging decision: breaking open a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil to search for preserved collagen tissue.
“It was a problem,” says Orgel. “It took me about three hours of walking away, coming back to it…It’s getting over the mental block; the value is inside.”
The research involved using extremely intense, tightly focused X-ray beams at Argonne National Laboratory’s synchrotron facility. This approach allowed Orgel and his team to detect collagenous peptide sequences inside fossil fragments without exposing the material on the surface. The method provides much higher precision than traditional X-ray imaging, requiring only small amounts of well-ordered material for analysis.
“What we did was take fossil fragments where the collagenous material was not exposed yet,” says Orgel. “The X-ray penetrates through the mineral, and it picks up signal from what's on the inside. Then, I went and did micro-surgery on the fossil and dug out tissue from inside.”
Orgel explained that minimizing noise in X-ray diffraction is critical for detecting ordered structures within samples. The use of micron-scale beams enabled his team to find small areas of preserved order deep within fossils.
“There’s a trade-off; it is better to have very little material that is very well-ordered than it is to have lots more that is a hodgepodge,” he says. “It’s like drawing something exquisite as a portrait and then deciding to scribble crayon across it.”
The findings suggest that complex biological structures may survive for tens of millions of years, which could challenge established views in paleontology and biology.
This imaging technique also has applications in medicine. Orgel’s team used it to examine nanoscopic damage caused by traumatic brain injury (TBI). The higher resolution allows doctors and researchers to identify damage previously undetectable due to its size or depth within brain tissue.
“It’s only invisible because you don’t have the resolution to see it,” says Orgel, comparing the previous detection abilities to seeing a black mark on a black background. “It’s only invisible to your eyes because you don’t have a microscope. It’s only invisible to your microscope because you’re using photons of a wavelength that isn’t short enough to see something smaller.”
By increasing resolution, scientists can better observe cellular-level effects of TBI, particularly changes affecting myelin sheaths around nerve fibers.
“These are sublimely, impossibly difficult problems, but they have tremendous application to the contemporary world,” says Orgel. “I just wanted to put this out there. If I’m right, there’s something not far away that’s probably relevant to a lot of biomedical interests. I should see if anyone else wants to run with it. And it turns out people want to run with it.”
Orgel is preparing his results for publication and anticipates broader interest in applying this technique across fields such as medicine and biology.