We wish to acquire a Biacore T-100, a chip-based biosensing instrument employing surface plasmon resonance (SPR) technology. This tool will provide biomedical investigators at the University of Rhode Island (URI) with state-of the-art capability for studying dynamic macromolecular interactions. The biomedical and molecular science community at URI has grown significantly in the past several years and we now have a critical mass of SPR users: six R01 grantees as major users and 15 minor users, many of whom have substantial funding support from NIH and other agencies. These investigators are affiliated with four different colleges: Pharmacy, Arts &Sciences, Environmental &Life Sciences, and Engineering. The proposed research projects are diverse and interdisciplinary in nature, involving nanotechnology for cancer imaging and therapy, kinase-substrate interactions, nuclear receptor interactions, and the effect of replication fork conformation on mutation &repair. Consequently, we are poised to make immediate use of the new instrument.
