Facilities within the Centre for Structural Biology (CSB)

Overview of available Facilities

Electron Microscopy Centre
Crystallisation
Biological Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)
Mass Spectrometry
X-Ray Crystallography
Protein Production Facility  

Facilities within the CSB include an X-ray crystallography suite (state of the art data collection systems and crystallisation robotics), the Electron Microscopy Centre comprising several FEG electron microscopes including the worlds first liquid helium cooled FEG (CM300), a new cross-faculty NMR centre comprising 600 and 800 instruments with cryoprobes MHz (operational 2005) and a state-of-the-art Mass Spectrometry centre comprising ultra-high sensitivity Q-Star and MALDI-TOF instruments.

PhD or equivalent facility managers, with the support of dedicated technical staff, run the facilities under the overall direction of senior academics.

The majority of the facilities are located within two adjacent but interconnected buildings (Flowers and Wolfson) on the South Kensington campus with the new NMR centre in close proximity (RCS1).

The CSB also has a number of supporting facilities including a Bioreactor suite, a high-throughput macromolecular crystallisation suite and a planned Biophysical Characterisation suite (operational 2005).

The Bioreactor suite located in Wolfson, comprises facilities for large scale culturing of cells including E .coli, S. cerevisiae and P. pastoris as well as mammalian cell culture and also Category 2 organisms.

The new biophysical suite will be located in Flowers and will comprise instruments that allow biophysical analyses of proteins and other macromolecules including protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions as well as protein folding and tertiary structure estimation.