The major user group of Investigators (Drs. D. Doyle, O.P. Bahl, J. Bruenn, F. Bellino, G. Synder and B. Nicholson), all of the Department of Biological Sciences, SUNY/Buffalo are requesting funds to purchase a high performance system for the analyses of amino acids and carbohydrates. The research activities of the Core group of investigators re diverse but this group of investigators relies heavily for their research programs on a Microinstrumentation Facility which has state of the art equipment consists of an Applied Biosystems gas phase microsequencer with on line HPLC and a Biosearch SAM 2 peptide synthesizer with IBM AT hardware and software for programming. The core group of investigators as well as other scientists in the Western New York area has used this instrumentation for the microsequencing of proteins and for the synthesis of peptides corresponding to sequences of interest in the protein of interest. The synthetic peptides have been used as antigens for the production of antibodies by Drs. Doyle, Bahl, Bruenn, Nicholson and Bellino and for analysis of parameters affecting sulfhydryl bond formation in model peptides (Synder). At present we do not have state of the are capability for the amino acid analysis of the synthesized peptides or for purified proteins. Further many of the proteins and peptide fragments with which we work are glycosylated and we need a state of the art system for carbohydrate analyses. At the present time we have an analyzer which is an outdated model 121MB which does not have the sensitivity and precision required to do our research on the quantities of material that we have available. With many of the Departmental members moving into the area of protein chemistry the need for such state of the art instrumentation is becoming critical. Both amino acid and carbohydrate analysis are essential to the structural determination and characterization of proteins and peptide fragments of proteins and synthetic peptides. The addition of the equipment request here would greatly enhance our research capability.
