Abstract
The Protein and Metabolite Analysis Facility at the University of Texas at Austin is a joint effort of the College of Pharmacy, Center for Research on Environmental Disease (CRED), and the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology (ICMB). Services and collaborative research are offered for the detection, characterization and quantification of biomolecules. The Facility's goals are to provide sensitive protein identification and modification analyses, to provide custom peptide syntheses, to offer services for the identification and quantification of metabolites, nutrients and xenobiotics, to implement novel analytical methods, to improve the sensitivity of existing analyses, to provide consultation on the selection and implementation of analytical methods, to offer training in the usage and applications of the instrumentation, and to provide technical expertise in support of individual research goals. The ICMB portion of the Core contains an ABI Procise 492 cLC protein sequencer, a Protein Technologies Inc. Symphony peptide synthesizer, two Bio-rad Duoflows and a GE Heathcare AKTA protein purification systems, two Beckman System Gold HPLC systems, a Berthold Technologies Mithras luminescence and fluorescence detector, an Invitrogen gel electrophoresis set-up, an Art Robbins Instruments Phoenix crystallography robot and a LC-MALDI-TOF/TOF (an ABI 4700 with a LC Packings Ultimate Nano-LC system with a Probot spotting robot). In the College of Pharmacy, the Core has an Applied Biosystems 4000 Q-trap LC MS/MS system with ESI, APCI and nanospray sources coupled with a Shimadzu LC-20AD HPLC system, ThermoFinnigan LCQ ion trap mass spectrometer with ESI, APCI and microspray interfaces combined with a Michrom Magic 2002 HPLC system, a ThermoFinnigan Trace MS GC-quadropole with EI positive, negative CI and selected ion monitoring (SIM), an ABI Voyager-DE Pro MALDI-TOF and a Bio-rad Bioplex 200 fluorescent microbead array system.