The primary goal of the X-ray Crystallography Core is to enable and facilitate the research of MSKCClaboratories that use X-ray crystallography as a tool to address questions in their research programs. Thefacility maintains in-house equipment for data collection, processing and structure determination, implementsa wide range of crystallographic and structure analysis software packages, provides long-term regularaccess to state-of-the-art synchrotron beamlines through participation in multi-institutional consortia at twonational laboratory locations, provides training and technical assistance to users of both the in-house andremote facilities, and provides expertise in structural biology and modeling and guidance to non-structuralMSKCC laboratories that benefit from the use of available structures in the design and interpretation ofexperiments.Structural biology has been playing an increasing role in understanding the many biological processesimportant in cancer and in accelerating the pace of anti-cancer drug discovery. In the post-genomic era, theneed for structural data to understand biological function and regulation, to provide scaffolds for the designor improvement of candidate anticancer compounds, and to help identify molecular function will increase withthe application of massively parallel data acquisition tools such as DMA arrays, global protein-proteininteraction maps and large scale identification of cancer-related genes. This will require increasedthroughput from conventional X-ray crystallography facilities, and new, state-of-the-art synchrotron facilitiesto accelerate structure determination and to allow the study of increasingly large and complex structures andmacromolecular assemblies.
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