The Berkeley Center for Structural
Biology (BCSB) is located within the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory. It hosts over 750 users, representing 160
different research groups. In 2004, 65 publications were reported involving
discoveries emerging from the facility (twelve of those appeared in Science,
Nature or Cell). About 168 protein structures were solved on our beamlines
in 2003.
Facilities
• Eight beamlines optimized for macromolecular protein crystallography
constructed and operated by several Participating Research Teams (PRTs),
funded in part by DOE/OBER and NIH/NIGMS with contributions from numerous
academic and industrial groups
• Six tuneable-wavelength MAD beamlines capable of phasing structures
as large as the 70S ribosome.
• Two monochromatic beamlines optimal for high-throughput data collection
• Crystal automounters on three beamlines to facilitate rapid screening
of crystals as part of drug design and structural genomics programs
The Berkeley Structural Genomics Center is one of nine pilot centers
funded by the NIH, National Institute of General Medical Sciences as part
of itsProtein Structure Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to
organize all known proteins into their structural families and then determining
the structure of one or more proteins per family. The center is focusing
on two bacteria with extremely small genomes to study proteins essential
for independent life. The bacteria, Mycoplasma genitalium and Mycoplasma
pneumoniae, are closely related organisms that are very common human pathogens.
The Computational Crystallography Initiative (CCI) is part of the Physical
Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The focus
of the initiative is the development of computational tools for high-throughput
structure determination. One of our primary goals is the creation of a
novel software package called PHENIX (Python-based Hierarchical Environment
for Integrated Xtallography). This software is being developed as part
of an international collaboration, funded by NIH and headed by the CCI
group. Those currently involved are: Tom Terwilliger (Los Alamos National
Laboratory), Randy Read (University of Cambridge, U.K.), Tom Ioerger and
Jim Sacchettini (Texas A&M University).
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