This award provides funds to Stanford University for the purchase of instrumentation for the Stanford Synchrotron Research Laboratory (SSRL). The equipment will facilitate data collection and analysis, allowing a significant increase in the number and types of experiments that can be performed, and will maximize the benefits to be gained from the recent improvement in quality and availability of synchrotron radiation at SSRL. The rapid growth in the understanding of the structure and function of proteins at the atomic level has resulted in large part through the development and perfection of computational tools and hardware used for X-ray crystallographic analysis of enzymes and other proteins. The use of synchrotrons as X-ray sources has, in particular, allowed the investigation of the structure of viruses and other very large protein structures that are otherwise inaccessible. Recent improvements in synchrotron design and in the equipment used for data collection and reduction has made once difficult investigations routine and has made new lines of investigation into enzyme mechanism possible. The equipment being purchased will provide the benefits of this progress to a large number of investigators from all sectors of the research community who use the SSRL.
