Instrumentation & Facilities

We can help you produce soluble protein for follow-up in vitro assays, high-throughput chemical screening and structural biology studies. We can clone various forms of your target simultaneously into expression vectors containing multiple cleavable tags for expression in E. coli, insect and mammalian cells. Equivalent yeast expression constructs are currently being developed. 

We have facilities to purify 1–100 milligrams of protein. In the facility, we have four rooms dedicated to protein expression with multiple variable temperature shakers for large- and small-scale expression, sonicators and a microfluidizer for breaking cells. 

The large wet lab has two AKTA pure 25 M fast protein liquid chromatography systems and two high-throughput AKTA Xpress units equipped with a variety of ion exchange, gel filtration and affinity columns.

Three environmental rooms adjacent to the wet lab are used for crystal growth at 4°C, 16°C and 20°C.

Each room is equipped with stereomicroscopes for crystal viewing. Two Gryphon crystallization robots capable of dispensing 100 nanoliter drops are available for rapid screening of hundreds of conditions using small quantities of macromolecule. One unit is dedicated to protein crystallization; one to the crystallization RNA and RNA-protein complexes.

On-Site Facility

Our X-ray crystallography facility includes an Excillum MetalJet-D2+ 70kV, 250W X-ray source equipped with high flux optics and Eiger2 R 4M hybrid photon counting detector. The EasyMount robot along with the point-and-click computer alignment takes the stress out of crystal mounting.

LS-CAT Synchrotron Beamlines

In addition to the on-site facilities, U-M is a member of LS-CAT, a consortium of academic and research institutions that operates a multi-beamline facility located at Sector 21 of Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source.

This facility consists of four experimental stations for X-ray crystallography with insertion device sources. Each station is equipped with state-of-the-art Arinax MD3-UP micro diffractometers, robotic sample changers and hybrid photon detectors.

• The primary station, 21-ID-D, is capable of serial and pump-probe crystallography and is tunable from 6.5–20 keV. This line is equipped with an EIGER 2X 16M detector.
• The 21-ID-F and 21-ID-G stations are at fixed energy (~12.7 keV) and are suitable for selenium SAD experiments. 21-ID-F is equipped with an EIGER 9 M , where 21-ID-G houses a PILATUS 6M detector.
• The fourth station, 21-ID-E, is currently under collaborative agreement with Diamond Light Source.

Microbeams are achievable on all lines as the MD3-UP diffractometers have a 200 nm sphere of confusion. Raster and helical scanning is also available on each line. Additionally, mail-in and remote access services are available.