Few fields of research have benefitted as significantly as structural biology from interdisciplinary synergies between lab-bench scale science on the one hand and large scale research infrastructure on the other. For almost four decades synchrotron radiation physicists, beamline engineers and protein crystallographers have cooperated to drive the field forwards.

The outcome has been a spectacular growth in the rate at which new protein structures are solved. The scientific output of this endeavour is illustrated by six Nobel Prizes in Chemistry (Michel, Deisenhofer, Huber 1988; Walker 1997; McKinnon 2003; Kornberg 2006; Steitz, Yonath, Ramakrishnan 2009, Kobilka 2012), whose breakthroughs derive from diffraction data collected using synchrotron radiation. It is of crucial relevance to underline that the use of synchrotron radiation for structure-based drug design has become mainstream within pharmaceutical industry.

Very close cooperation between traditionally separate fields of research continues to be absolutely essential at the very cutting edge of structural biology. These opportunities include the use of short-pulsed X-ray sources for extracting time-dependent structural information from proteins; and the revolutionary new possibilities created by X-ray Free Electron Lasers, which combine ultrafast X-ray pulses with high brilliance focussing capabilities to create an entirely new regime of pre-damage time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography on unprecedented time-scales.

Exploitation of the new scientific opportunities created by the changing technical landscape requires close interdisciplinary collaboration between structural biologists, physical chemists, beamline engineers, software developers, and industrial partners.

Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) will contribute strongly to both objectives and, through networking, secondments and joint experiments, benefit from cross-fertilisation of scientific ideas and technical solutions. On the technical side, the advent of improved synchrotron beamlines and advanced detector and sample handling technologies, as well as the enormous potential of X-ray free electron lasers (X-FELs), lends X-probe great importance as both a mechanism for developing new measurement techniques and as a platform for training the young scientists who will apply these techniques throughout their scientific careers.

X-FELs represent a major step forward in source performance and will require new measurement philosophies and equipment. Advances in detector technology require increased capabilities for data transfer and storage and improved algorithms for the processing of terabyte data sets. These developments will place heavy demands on motivated and highly trained talent. The time is ripe for bringing young scientists into the loop.

X-probe will train the nucleus of a new community spread across Europe that widens the access and use of non-conventional methods to image the time-evolution of biological systems.