Starting end of 2015 - beginning of 2016, the “Centre of Molecular Structure” (CMS) has become fully operational. This is a technical platform of the Institute of Biotechnology (Czech Academy of Sciences) located at Biocev in Vestec. CMS is a part of the Czech infrastructure for integrative structural biology (CIISB).
The CMS welcomes guests to use its facilities, in order to help them solve their problems using the available technologies. These are divided into three large sectors: 1) biophysical measurements; 2) advanced structural mass spectrometry 3) macromolecular crystallization and X-ray diffraction, with the associated state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation.
The available technologies will be presented by means of the story of a beginning scientist, just embarking on a scientific career in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (story telling): how the CMS facilities are used in order to help solve the problems encountered during a research project.
The equipment available at the CMS is listed in the following table:
Instrument name Technology Used for
Biophysical measurements
Specord 50 Plus UV/Vis spectrometer High precision UV/Vis spectroscopy
Chirascan Plus Circular dichroism Conformation of macromolecules
ProteOn XPR36 Surface Plasmon Resonance Analysis of interactions
Monolith NT.115 Thermophoresis Study of interactions
Monolith NT.LabelFree Thermophoresis Study of protein interactions
Prometheus NT.48 Differential Scanning Fluorimetry Protein stability
Microcal iTC200 Calorimetry Characterisation of interactions
Microcal DSC Calorimetry Thermal transitions analysis
Zetasizer Nano ZS90 Dynamic light scattering Analysis of particle size / hydrodynamic radii
Mass spectrometry
Bruker Solarix 15T MALDI or electrospray ionization Analysis of biomacromolecules and complexes
by advanced mass spec
Protein Crystallography
Spectrolight 600 In-drop dynamic light scattering Determine mono-dispersity in drops
Art Robbins Gryphon Automated multichannel pipetting Crystallisation by robotics
Formulatrix RI1000 Crystallisation plate hotel Design of crystallisation plans; storage and visualization of crystallisation plates
D8 Venture liq Ga source X-ray generation and detection Testing of crystal diffraction (including in-situ);
with Photon II detector diffraction data collection
This work is supported by the project "BIOCEV – Biotechnology and Biomedicine Centre of the Academy of Sciences and Charles University (CZ.1.05/1.1.00/02.0109)” from the ERDF, and by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports under National support of research infrastructures (infrastructure CIISB, project no. LM2015043).