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The Protein X-ray Crystallography Core Facility is hosted by the
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The purpose of
the Facility is to provide equipment, training, assistance, and
technological innovation for determining 3D atomic structures of
proteins and other macromolecules. Services provided by the
Facility include: aid in crystallization, x-ray characterization
of crystals, x-ray data collection, processing and quality
analysis of data, and structure determination and display.
The X-ray Crystallography Core Facility is located on the
east side of the 5th floor of the Crescent (Room C5722). It
contains a crystallization room, an x-ray enclosure, and a
computational area for data collection, data processing, and
structure determination. The Crystallization room houses a
Douglas Instruments Oryx6 crystallization robot for microbatch
crystallization experiments and equipment for more traditional
crystallization. Eleven 48-condition, seven 24-condition, three
96-condition Hampton Screens, and six 96-condition Nextal Suites
are available. Three vibration free chambers, maintained at 15
¡ãC, 10
¡ãC and room temperature are available for storage of
trays. An Olympus SZ-61 microscopes for inspecting crystal trays
is also housed here. The x-ray enclosure houses an R-Axis IV++
mounted on a Rigaku Micromax-007 x-ray generator. The x-ray beam
is focused by Confocal Blue mirrors. An Xstream 2000 cryostat is
also maintained. This Facility is kept at 25
¡ãC by two
independent air conditioning systems. The computing area
contains two Dell Dimension PCs (Pentium IV, CPU 3.00GHz) used
for data collection and data processing, and a Silicon Graphics
Octane workstation for structure determination, visualization
and refinement. Standard crystallographic software is freely
accessible for use in this facility.
SGI Altix 350 Server is based on 64-bit Linux
operating system. It consists of 8 x 1.5 Ghz Intel Itanium
2 processors sharing 8 GB of memory. |
