The X-ray Crystallography Shared Facility provides a unique, state-of-the art crystallography facility for Cancer Center members and other regional scientists. In the last five years, the facility has acquired extensive high through put capabilities, including dedicated access to two beamlines at the Argonne Synchrotron Facility, a fully-automated nano-crystallization laboratory and a liquid diffusion crystallization via an automated microfluidics system. The facility also has four rotating anode generators with multiple image plate detection systems, crystallographic computing and graphics packages to support structural studies. The facility is currently supporting more than twenty different cancer related projects. The Core is currently being used to support structural studies of major Cancer Center programs such as structural studies, of lymphokines and cytokines, the Cancer Center SPORE program involving 'preclinical/clinical development of novel retinoids for breast cancer prevention'. The Core is currently being used to crystallize novel retinoid-retinoic acid nuclear receptor complexes (RARs) to support drug development to prevent skin cancer and to treat breast cancer and leukemia. Other structural studies include ligand/DNA interactions, chaperone proteins, Apo-lipoprotein A-I, a DNA repair endonuclease, several different toll-like receptors, Mark-3 kinase and the development of novel pirn kinase inhibitors. The value of the Core's novel crystallization capabilities is highlighted by results produced from multiple investigators from the NCI. In the last six months the Core was able to produce crystals of five different NCI proteins.
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