Facilities

Overview

The Centre for Structural Biology is one of the College's Multi-Faculty Centres and Networks and comprises five facilities: 

  • The Crystallography Facility provides instrumentation and support on all levels of macromolecular crystallisation, X-ray crystallographic data collection, data processing and structure model building. The Facility is equipped with a high-flux generator, microfocus optics, cryostreams, and two detectors. A high-throughput macromolecular Crystallisation Suite with crystallization and liquid-handling robotic equipment is available in the facility too.
  • The Electron Microscopy (EM) Facility has several FEG electron microscopes equipped with direct electron detectors.
  • The Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Facility comprises 600 MHz and 800 MHz ultrashielded spectrometer with cryoprobes and a 600 MHz spectrometer for biosolids applications. 
  • The Mass Spectrometry (MS) Facility comprises an ultra-high sensitivity Q-Star and MALDI-TOF instruments.
  • The Macromolecular Interactions (MI) Facility provides support for protein biophysical characterisation, including protein-protein interaction and protein secondary structure analysis. The Facility is equipped with SEC-MALS (Agilent), ITC200 (Malvern), CD (Applied Photophysics Chirascan) and SPR (Biacore 3000). 
The CSB also has a supporting facility, the Bioreactor/Protein Production Suite, which is quipped for the large-scale culturing of E. coli, S. cerevisiae and P. pastoris cells and cell disruption, in containment level 1.