Every year since 1923 the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) awards the Newcomb Cleveland Prize to the authors of an outstanding research article published in the prestigious ‘Science’ peer-reviewed academic journal.

The 2025 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize was awarded to an international team of researchers for their extraordinary research entitled “Nitrogen-fixing organelle in marine alga”. Their research identified the first known nitrogen-fixing organelle, called the nitroplast within an eukaryotic cell and used the soft X-ray microscopy facilities at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to help achieve this profound insight.

LBNL is one of only six global synchrotron facilities that has the infrastructure to illuminate a soft X-ray microscope, explaining why this powerful imaging modality has remained relatively unknown in the structural biology research community.

SiriusXT has developed and launched the first commercially available lab-based soft X-ray microscope (the SXT-100), democratising this powerful imaging modality and opening up the possibilities for more incredible scientific breakthroughs!