Title: ?Console Upgrade and Cryogenic Probe for a 500 MHz NMR System for Biomedical Research?. Project Summary/Abstract: The Mary L. Vanier Biomolecular NMR Facility at Kansas State University, which has served more than 30 separate NIH-funded research projects and several other life sciences research groups (Total 45), requests partial funding to replace an obsolete Varian 500 MHz NMR system (originally purchased in 1993) with a newer console and a 5 mm cryogenic-probe. This upgrade will provide NMR instrumentation essential for studying proteins or protein domains structure and dynamics, and the relation of these to protein function. The new purchase will improve the research capabilities at Kansas State University (KSU) in numerous NIH funded collaborative projects covering a broad range of biomedical research including cancer, inflammation, viral and insect-borne diseases. The research in these areas is severely hampered by lack of suitable biomolecular NMR equipment availability to NIH-funded biomedical researchers (Drs. Kanost, Chang, Geisbrecht, Roelofs, Park, Ganta, Prakash, Zolkiewski and others from division of biology and diagnostic medicine) at our campus. Currently an outmoded Varian 500 NMR spectrometer is the sole instrument for performing protein NMR studies at this campus. This instrument is unable to execute the required 2D and 3D heteronuclear NMR experiments. Many of our local NIH supported researchers are forced to go to distant facilities for 2D and 3D NMR studies on their samples. Therefore, we propose to replace our current obsolete Varian console and cold probe with a Bruker BioSpin AVANCE NEO console and a triple resonance cryogenic-probe. The choice of Bruker is based on performance of electronics and the compatibility of the current Oxford 500 MHz magnet. Our request for replacing the current console and cold-probe is also justified due to following reasons: 1) Lack of appropriate service, parts and repair for our 500 MHz Varian NMR console and cold-probe from original manufacturer ( Withdrawal of Varian and now Agilent Technologies Inc. from the NMR market.); 2) Catastrophic failure of triple resonance cold-probe and extreme difficulties in its repairing; 3) Inability to perform 2D and 3D triple resonance experiments essential for protein NMR studies; and 4) Many of our biological NMR samples are limited due to low expression levels of proteins, low solubility, or short-lived stability, requiring higher sensitivity and rapid data collection. Overall, the new purchase will not only replace an obsolete console equipped with a cold-probe, but will provide a shared instrumentation necessary to complete more than ten on-going NIH-funded research projects at Kansas State University. This acquisition will benefit basic, comparative, and translational research in a substantial way and will undoubtedly help the entire campus biomedical community including the College of Veterinary Medicine.
Kansas State University is seeking partial funds to replace obsoleted console and cryo-probe for a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer that will be used for health related structure-function and disease relationship research in the areas of cancer, immunology, virology and pest control. Most of the research projects in this application aim at understanding the structure and function of a variety of proteins or protein domains relevant to human health.
