This is a request to purchase a Peptide Synthesizer to replace our current instrument. Our Applied Biosystems 430A Peptide Synthesizer was obtained ten years ago on a shared instrumentation grant. This instrument has been faithfully maintained and continuously operated. However it is now at the end of its natural lifetime, currently requires extensive maintenance, and has been declared obsolete by the manufacturer. The requested Symphony Synthesizer significantly advances the capability of peptide synthesis by providing for much more flexible synthesis scales and the accompanying Symphony cascade apparatus allows for the application of powerful combinatorial methods to address problems of particular significance in the research of the participating investigators. In addition the new instrument is considerably more efficient thereby dramatically reducing the cost of peptide synthesis. Participating in this application are eight funded investigators at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine representing the departments of Pharmacology, Physiology and Biophysics, and Microbiology. The instrument will be operated and maintained by Dr. Imre Wolf, an accomplished peptide chemist and instrumentation specialist who has operated the Mount Sinai Core facility Milligen peptide synthesizer.
