Facilities

The Center benefits from access to resources within individual laboratories as well as shared facilities at UCSF, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Protein Expression, Characterization and Crystallization

• Facilities and expertise at the UC Berkeley Keck MacroLab, which develops automated procedures to overproduce proteins and complexes in E. Coli.
• Facilities at UCSF for large-scale culture and fermentation for expression of proteins in E. Coli, yeast, baculovirus-infected cells and mammalian cells, including those at the UCSF Membrane Protein Expression Center and UCSF Center for Structures of Membrane Proteins, which develop innovative methods for producing intact membrane proteins for structural/functional studies.

X-ray Crystallography

• Two primary sources of x-ray diffraction for crystal screening, at UCSF and Berkeley.
• Data collection time at beamlines 8.3.1 and 5.0.2 at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL)

NMR

• 500, 600, 800 MHz Spectrometers housed at UCSF, outfitted with cryoprobes and capable of triple resonance and pulsed field gradient experiments.
• 900 MHz Spectrometer shared instrument housed at Berkeley, outfitted with a cryoprobe and capable of triple resonance and pulsed field gradient experiments.

Cryo-EM and Microscopy

• Three advanced cryo-electron microscopes, including a Tecnai Polara microscope (field emission gun and 300kV) equipped with a post-column energy filter (GIF) and FEI T20 and T12 microscopes with LaB6 electron sources housed at the UCSF Keck Advanced Microscopy Laboratory.