For the Audible NMR Project on our unofficial site, click here

To hear the radio feature on this project and our facility, broadcast on April 30, 2007, for the Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ) program Eight-Forty-Eight, click here

NMR Facility

The BSD Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Facility serves the University of Chicago's biomolecular NMR needs. We offer premium instrumentation, semi-automated data acquisition software, free data analysis tools and user guides, offline processing facilities, and expert biomolecular service. 

We help address a wide range of biochemical questions, including:

Macromolecular structure

  • What is the 3D atomic-resolution structure of my protein/carbohydrate/nucleic acid?
  • Is my protein fully structured?
  • Is my protein partly structured/partly denatured, or is it slightly unstructured all over? 
  • Which parts of my protein are structured?

Protein folding and dynamics

  • How flexible is my protein?
  • How fast are each of my hydrogens exchanging?

Binding

  • How tightly does this ligand bind my biomolecule?
  • Where does my ligand bind?
  • What's the bound conformation of my ligand?
  • What is the epitope on my protein?

Screening

  • What is the best candidate for a binding molecule in this soup of potential binders?

Analytical Chemistry

  • What is this stuff? We've got pure material but don't know what compound it is!

Access to the instruments is available to researchers whom we have trained or approved. We instruct people in the operation of the instrumentation as well as the use of standard sophisticated software analysis packages. 

As a service, we can also run experiments, perform the data processing and analysis. Indeed, one can use the instruments indepdently, hand us samples for data collection and analysis, or anything in between.

Please explore our unofficial web site to find out more about our facility, download data we've posted for you there, download software guides, or just to see what's there:
http://homepage.mac.com/jkurutz/Menu15.html

 

Where is the Facility?

Our facility is split between two locations. Our new office and offline computing space is on the first floor of the new Center for Integrative Science (CIS) building, room W123B. The spectrometers remain in the old location, which was explicitly designed to satisfy their stringent environmental needs, in the Cummings Annex.