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Protein Crystallography Core Facility
The main goal of the facility is to support structural biology research on the UT campus. The facility maintains state of the art X-ray equipment and ancillary equipment to complement crystallization experiments. In addition it provides training and support services to allow new users to solve and evaluate macromolecular structures.
Equipment
Rigaku MicroMax 007 X-ray generator (x1)
Rigaku
Rigaku RU3H X-ray generators (x1)
Rigaku
Rigaku Raxis IV++ X-ray detectors (x3)
Rigaku
Oxford Coldstream Cryocoolers (x3)
Fine focus mirror systems (x3)
Phoenix liquid handling crystallization robot (x1)
Rigaku
Microscopes and related tools for crystal freezing and handling
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Software
The facility maintains state of the art crystallography software, including HKL2000, the CCP4 and CNS program suites along with building and display software like COOT and PyMol.
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Virtual Screening
The Protein Crystallography Core Facility also houses the Virtual Screening section of the TI-3D. This includes a 64 core parallel computer, and modern drug docking software, such as GOLD and ICM.
Virtual screening is the name given to the process of docking three-dimensional models of drug-like compounds into three dimensional models of potential drug receptors, usually proteins. Such computational methods are far faster, and cheaper, than physically testing tens of thousands of potential drugs in chemical or cell-based assays, which has been a standard in the pharmaceutical industry for generations. The ligands to be docked may have a number of rotatable bonds, generating a huge number of potential conformations to be examined; energetic calculations are used to rank protein-ligand interactions. Today all large pharmaceutical houses use virtual screening operations to facilitate their drug discovery programs.
The accompanying movie shows the program ICM docking trial compounds into the active site of the drug target enzyme ricin.
Note: You need the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer to play this movie.
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Location
Mailing Address
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712
Mail Code: Currently Unavailable
Physical Location
The University of Texas at Austin
Robert A. Welch Hall
Map
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