The X-ray Crystallography Facility at MUSC

Director: Christopher Davies, Ph.D. Manager: Christopher Snook, Ph.D. Business Manager: Scott Reid
Location: Dept. Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Rms. 527, 530-531 BSB, 173 Ashley Ave, Charleston SC.

Purpose:

To provide biomolecular crystallography to the MUSC scientific community. The X-ray crystallography facility is a recent addition to MUSC's core facilities designed to provide access to cutting edge technology enabling the visualization molecules of interest for investigators that would otherwise be unable to afford to use the technique either in time or personnel. The facility consists of three laboratories: crystallization, X-ray crystallography (data collection) and molecular graphics.

MUSC is equipped with state-of-the art facilities for X-ray crystallography. This is a major new facility and it paves the way for researchers at MUSC to engage in high resolution structural studies of biological macromolecules. Such detailed structural information is often instrumental in enhancing our knowledge of different biological systems, many of which are disease related such as the molecular events that lead to cancer or the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance, and also include fundamental aspects of biology such as signal transduction, enzymology, translation, and DNA replication, to name a few.

Equipment:

Crystallization Lab - Incubators for constant temperature crystal growth, shelves for room temperature crystal growth, 2 stereo microscopes (one equipped with a digital video camera at room temperature and one at 4 degrees).

X-ray Crystallography Lab - Rigaku RU-H3R 5.4 kW rotating anode X-ray generator, Confocal mirror optics, RAXIS-IV++ Image-plate detector and X-stream cryo-cooling device for data collection down to 100 K.

Molecular Graphics Lab - Silicon Graphics computers, Linux PC's and 1 Linux file server all configured to use common crystallographic software packages for model-building, analysis and refinement.