The Structural Biology Facility provides: a) resources required for crystallographic structure determination,refinement and analysis, b) molecular graphics and computational support for structural biology, c) moleculargraphics and computational support for structure-based drug discovery and d) highly specialized resourcesfor macromolecular characterization related to structural biology. The Facility is essential for the researchprograms of investigators of the Cancer Center who are studying the relationship between macromolecularstructure and function or who are using macromolecular structure as the starting point for structure-baseddrug design. It is a unique resource at Northwestern University that capitalizes on the extensive expertise ofa large group of users and the unique access to the synchrotron radiation X-ray source at Argonne NationalLaboratories. It also serves to nucleate the development of a local community with expertise in structural andcomputational biology. Such expertise will increasingly be called upon as the structures of more cancerrelatedproteins become available.The Structural Biology Facility is, as are its investigators, located on both campuses of NorthwesternUniversity, based in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology on the Evanstoncampus, in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry at the Medical Schoolcampus, and also at the LS-CAT sector of Advanced Photon Source. Dr. Alfonso Mondragon, a structuralbiologist at the Evanston Campus, directs the Facility. The Facility consists of four major components: 1) anoutstation at the APS that is devoted to state-of-the-art macromolecular crystallography, 2) X-ray diffractionfacilities at the Chicago and Evanston campuses to support preliminary and more routine crystallographicexperiments, 3) computational facilities at both campuses to support structural determination calculations,both NMR and crystallographic, computational drug-design, and modeling efforts, including advancedgraphical visualization and manipulation of models, and 4) a relatively new component which providesautomated facilities for setting up and visualizing crystallization experiments and for characterization ofmacromolecules for structural studies. The distributed nature of the facility reflects the means by which thedata collection, computational, molecular visualization, and other scientific resources are networked, andthus integrated, for the structural biology research community at Northwestern.
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