We are requesting a Biacore 8K from the NIH Shared Instrumentation Program (SIG) to establish a Biomolecular Interaction Analysis Shared Resource (BIASR) at Rutgers University. This instrument will be used to meet the demand for small fragment/molecule screening and biomolecular interaction analysis by NIH funded investigators at the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS), School of Engineering (SOE), Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) and the two main medical schools, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) and the New Jersey Medical School (NJMS), which are now part of Rutgers. The current refurbished Biacore T200 in the PI?s lab is used at maximal capacity and is aging. There is no other Biacore instrument at any campus of Rutgers University, including the two medical schools. Due to the demand of our investigators and the limited capability of T200 additional resources are needed. Biacore 8K is our instrument of choice because of its high throughput capability, sensitivity, high sample capacity, 8x faster run time and because it can run multiple operations in an automated fashion. Biacore 8K has ABA injection option, which allows competition experiments between inhibitors to determine the binding site selectivity, a capability required for many projects and is not available on T200. The new Insight software on the 8K allows user-friendly evaluation of screening data. Biacore 8K will enable fragment/small molecule based ligand discovery against pathogens and toxins and provide detailed kinetic analysis of disease specific biomolecular interactions at Rutgers for the first time. Biacore 8K will be operated and maintained by highly skilled technical personnel at the SEBS Core Facility. We had access to a demo instrument for 3 weeks, which allowed us to screen 3000 small molecules against a target protein in 6 days, which would require 5 weeks on the T200. In addition we obtained competition data between inhibitors, which is not possible on the T200. With the availability of a number of small molecule libraries we will be able to provide our technical expertise and services in high throughput screening and in biomolecular interaction analysis to investigators across multiple Rutgers campuses to support cutting edge research and to provide a unique opportunity to collaborate.
This proposal requests a high throughput Biacore instrument that will be used by the research projects of NIH- supported investigators at Rutgers University. This instrument will support high throughput screening to identify lead compounds against multiple pathogen and disease targets and provide detailed kinetic analysis of dynamic biomolecular interactions.
