The primary mission of the Structural Biology Facility is to provide state-of-the-art equipment, training, technical support and maintenance of equipment indispensable for structural biologists and other researchers studying the structures of biological macromolecules and materials. The facility also provides structure determination and data collection services, both for crystallography and cryoEM.
The facility plays an essential role in the research programs of investigators who are studying the relationship between macromolecular structure and function, using macromolecular structure as the starting point for structure-based drug design, or needing to characterize complex biomaterials. It is a unique resource at Northwestern University that capitalizes on the extensive expertise of its facility managers to provide access and support for experiments using the synchrotron radiation X-ray source at the Life Sciences Collaborative Access Team (LS-CAT) beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory and state-of-the-art electron microscopes and detectors, suitable for atomic-level structural studies by CryoEM on the Evanston campus.
In house Crystallography, Electron Microscopy and managed beam time at the LS-CAT (APS)
Support and Training
Macromolecular Structure Determination and Analysis, Crystallography
Full Services Section
Synchrotron Crystallography (Sector 21, LS-CAT of the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory)
In-House Crystallography (Chicago Campus in Tarry 7-710)
Evanston Campus (fourth floor of Cook Hall)
Cryo Electron Microscopy (Evanston Campus, B509 Silverman Hall and Silverman Hall 2nd Floor)
Computational (Evanston Campus, fourth floor of Cook Hall)
We support a wide variety of software for structure determination and analysis with identical computing environments on both the Evanston and Chicago campuses. Macromolecular crystallography software includes the CCP4 suite, Phenix, CNS, SHARP, and SOLVE, and X-ray diffraction data processing programs HKL2000, XDS and MOSFLM. For cryoEM we support appion, EMAN, relion, 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, Pymol, MIDAS, Molscript, Raster3D, RasMol, WHATIF, XtalView, Quanta and GRASP. We support modeling, simulations and drug discovery software packages including AlphaFold, DOCK, AutoDock, GOLD, SYBYL, Allegro, Delphi, GROMACS, AMBER, AMSOL, MS and INSIGHT/DISCOVER.
All manuscripts and grants presenting work supported by this core should include the following acknowledgement:
This work used resources of the Northwestern University Structural Biology Facility, which is generously supported by NCI CCSG P30 CA060553 awarded to the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center.
If K2 detector was used:
The Gatan K2 direct electron detector was purchased with funds provided by the Chicago Biomedical Consortium with support from the Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust
If K3 detector was used:
We acknowledge the use of the Ametek K3 direct electron detector, which was generously provided by Professor Robert A. Lamb, Ph.D., Sc.D., HHMI investigator
If LS-CAT resources were used:
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. Use of the LS-CAT Sector 21 was supported by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and the Michigan Technology Tri-Corridor (Grant 085P1000817).
For guidance on which cores may be most useful for your research and to coordinate use, please use the Core Navigator chatbot or contact Sara Fernandez Dunne at s-fernandez@northwestern.edu or 847.491.5960.