The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), is embarking on a major new initiative to develop a Center for Molecular Structure which will serve the largest four-year and Masters' degree- granting public university system (CSU) in the United States. We have recently been designated as the site for a core facility for research and training in this area by the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology (CSUPERB). Our campus, the University system and industry enthusiastically support this project and have committed well over 50% of the costs of developing this core facility. The x-ray laboratory of the Center will be housed in renovated facilities specifically designed for this Center, to be located in McCarthy Hall adjacent to our new 60,000 square foot Science Laboratory Center (SLC). Critical to the efficient and timely establishment of this core facility are NSF funds which we are requesting here to acquire a modern, high-powered crystallographic system and computer workstations for small molecule and macromolecular applications. The Siemens instrumentation we have selected is a completely integrated multiwire area detector/rotating anode crystallography system for macromolecules that can also be used as a small molecule diffractometer. The configuration of the Silicon Graphics workstations and software library, the first of its kind in the CSU system, is ideally suited to meeting the needs of our students and faculty in a variety of structural studies. These include 1 ) structural studies on bacterial toxins, bovine ceruloplasmin, horse spleen and serum ferritins, gly- and phe-tRNA synthetases from E. coli, and model complexes of heme proteins; 2) structural studies of novel organometallic compounds, di- and trinuclear platinum compounds, and lithium salts of dianions; 3) molecular modeling studies of hemoproteins and organotin-based polymer systems; 5) comput ational studies on oxyallyl cation chemistry; 6) lipid bilayer simulations. The Director of the Center is Dr. Katherine Kantardjieff, who joined the CSUF faculty in 1989 from the Molecular Biology Institute and Department of Chemistry at UCLA, where she worked in David Eisenberg's group studying the structure of diphtheria toxin. The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at CSUF is committed to high-quality research programs as an integral part of both our undergraduate and graduate education programs. The 20 full- time faculty in the Department have established an exemplary record of external funding and consistently publish in the top peer-reviewed journals in their field. This project, however, will advance not only the research and training capabilities of our Department, but also those of the entire 20 campus CSU system. Facilities within the Center will complement, not duplicate, existing NMR, EPR and electron microscope facilities at CSUF and within the CSU. Facilities within the Center will provide molecular modeling capabilities and computational power to the entire CSU by means of the existing high-speed fiber optic network. The Center for Molecular Structure will promote the advancement of knowledge at the mainstream of scientific endeavor and make a significant contribution to the training and development of the next generation of scientists.
