Welcome to X-Ray Crystallography Core Facility

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.