We request funds to establish a large-scale (up to 100 liters) bacterial culture facility in Memphis, TN, to be located at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (St. Jude). This facility will be available to serve a broad community of scientists in Memphis, including those at St. Jude, The University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center (U. Tennessee), St. Jude's partner in graduate education, and The University of Memphis (U. Memphis), a partner in many collaborative research projects. The purpose of this facility is to enable the large-scale production of proteins and other biomolecules for structural, biochemical and drug discovery studies. The proposed Fermentation Facility will impact a wide variety of NIH-funded biomedical research projects at the three institutions noted above, ranging from structural investigations into basic biological function and structure-based drug design, to the production of small molecules as intermediates for the synthesis of new therapeutics and high-throughput small-molecule screening. Overall, the Fermentation Facility will contribute to advancing research funded by more than one dozen R01, P01, U01, or R37 applications distributed between the three institutions. The principal contribution to ongoing research will be to enable large-scale production of biomolecule samples, especially proteins. In some cases, large-scale protein production is already under way but is performed in a highly time inefficient manner. Access to the proposed fermentor will allow scientists to focus much more of their time on biochemical and structural studies rather than on protein production. In other cases, production of certain proteins is currently out of reach due to low expression levels. Studies in this category will be made possible through access to the 100-liter fermentor. An additional benefit associated with creating this facility is the promotion of intra- and inter-institutional collaboration. While many of the participants here already collaborate, use of a shared Fermentation Facility will foster interactions between groups, especially at the level of graduate students and postdoctoral trainees who will actually perform fermentation experiments.
