The use of equipment for automated protein sequencing and peptide synthesis has, in the last few years, become crucial to the progress of research in many areas of biological science. Determination of the amino acid sequence of a protein is often a required initial step in the isolation and subsequent sequence analysis of the gene, or DNA, that encodes the protein. Synthesis of peptides is often an important step for modern analysis of functional and structural aspects of proteins and of the regulation of genes. The funds provided by this award will be used to purchase instruments that perform purification of proteins and synthetic peptides, and the automated sequencing of proteins. The equipment will be housed with existing and other new instrumentation in the Central Service Laboratory, and will be devoted to providing service to approximately 50 researchers on the Oregon State campus. Researchers whose projects are discussed in the proposal are active in animal, plant and bacterial virology, neurobiology, cellular biochemistry, enzymology, or biophysics.
