Acquisition of Instrumentation for Macromolecular Crystallography at the Dupont-Northwestern-Dow Collaborative Access Team Beamlines

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This award supports the purchase of a CCD detector for X-ray data collection at the Dupont-Northwestern-Dow Collaborative Access Team (DND-CAT) beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source. The detector will be used by crystallographers at Northwestern and by independent investigators to determine the high resolution X-ray structures of proteins and nucleic acids. Knowledge of the three dimensional structure of biological macromolecules is essential to a comprehensive understanding of chemical and biological processes. The research problems being addressed cover a wide range of fundamental problems, including the structure of ribonucleic acids, proteins involved in DNA modification and replication, the biology of copper trafficking, mechanisms of the immune recognition and virus infection, the transport of proteins across membranes, and mechanisms of cellular signal transduction. The requested instrumentation will be used to outfit a new experimental station (the 5-BMB station) at DND-CAT. This station is designed to meet the expanding scientific needs of the Northwestern crystallographers, and only requires the equipment described in this proposal to become operational. The requested detector, a 3K x 3K Mar CCD detector, will have an active surface area greater than twice the size of the current detectors. The larger size is required to collect high resolution data from crystals with large unit cell dimensions. Since the structural biologists are pursuing more and more ambitious projects, such as the structures of protein-protein complexes, large unit cell dimensions are becoming common. This detector will be absolutely necessary to obtain high resolution data. In addition, the award will support the purchase of a cryo cooling system for low temperature data collection, a table to house the detector, a computer for data processing and storage, and a fluorescence detector for multiwavelength anomalous dispersion (MAD) phasing experiments. The CCD detector, combined with these items, will render the 5-BMB station a state-of-the-art macromolecular crystallography facility. The 3K x 3K CCD detector will provide a unique data collection resource and enable both the Northwestern structural biologists and outside users to tackle previously unfeasible projects. In addition, it will strengthen the Northwestern training program in biophysics. Approximately 25 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will use the equipment regularly. The inclusion of outside users will increase the number of potential trainees significantly. The new facilities will also allow more undergraduate students to be introduced to structural biology and participate in research projects at the forefront of modern science. Finally, the instrumentation will help efforts to recruit new graduate students and minority students, thus strengthening all the Northwestern research programs.