Office for Research Structural Biology Facility

A highly purified and concentrated sample is provided by the user, which they can work with themselves, or submit to the facility for crystallization screening. Crystallization robots and an array commercial screens and crystallization plates are available and allow for efficient broad screening of crystallization conditions. Conditions can be optimized by creating additional more focused screens using the Dragonfly. Data are collected by either the user or facility staff at LS-CAT (Sector 21) at the APS using time scheduled and administered by the facility. Data processing, structure determination and refinement can be done either by users or staff. Staff can also generate figures and diagrams for publication or grants.

A sample supplied by user can be evaluated and images collected using negative stained grids in the JEOL JEM-1400 by either approved trained users or staff.  For cryoEM, samples are frozen in vitreous ice using the facility cryo-plungers and images are collected by approved trained users or by staff on the Glacios equipped with a Direct Electron Detector.

Computational support is available for a wide range of programs for data processing and analysis.  Extensive support for macromolecular crystallography. For electron microscopy a Leginon/Appion host system is configured for the Glacios and JEOL 1400 microscopes with 60TB local storage for automated EM data collection. 10Gbps fiber-based network connections are maintained linking the main data collection computers, LS-CAT at the APS, and the computational server.  Multiple CPU and GPU nodes for handling demanding EM and Molecular Dynamics (MD) jobs are available, as well as a high performance shared parallel filesystem with currently over 90TB storage capacity. Several available graphics workstations enable an integrated environment.  Backup services are also provided.

We support a wide-variety of software for structure determination and analysis with identical computing environments on both the Evanston and Chicago campuses. Several macromolecular crystallography software packages including the CCP4 suite, Phenix, SHARP, and SOLVE, and X-ray diffraction data processing programs HKL2000, Dials, autoPROC, XDS and MOSFLM are supported. For cryoEM we support Appion, EMAN2, Relion, CryoSPARC, cisTEM, Spider, Xmipps and others. For NMR we support CNS, FELIX and Aria. We support molecular graphics software for model building, analysis and presentation including COOT, ImageJ, Chimera, Pymol, WHATIF, VMD, and APBS. We support modeling and simulation software packages including AutoDock, GOLD, GROMACS, AMBER, and NAMD.

Training on all instruments is available upon request.  Training on the JEOL 1400 and Glacios should be discussed with staff in advance.

Technical support and consultation are available for completing projects by macromolecular crystallography and/or single particle electron microscopy.