New York Structural Biology Center Inc

Nysbc provides access to high-field nuclear magnetic resonance (nmr) spectroscopy to faculty from its nine member institutions. The nmr facility instrumentation includes nine nmr spectrometers that generally operate 24 hrs/day, 7 days/week. In 2024, each spectrometer was available, on average, 345 days. These resources allow researchers to determine the structure of proteins in solution and in solid state atomic resolution, data that provides insight into the functional properties of the proteins. In 2024, group members from the laboratories of 17 affiliated principal investigators made use of these instruments. Data collected with these instruments produced 18 publications in eminent scientific journals. The center operates the center on molecular dynamics by comd/nmr, a biomedical technology research resource supported by u.s. National institutes of health grants rm1 gm145397 and located at nysbc. The mission of comd-nmr is to make available to the biological research community advanced nmr spectroscopic and computational methods for characterizing protein and nucleic acid conformational dynamics in biological processes.

Nysbc has maintained x-ray crystallography resources at brookhaven national laboratory (bnl) since 2003. Nysbc has developed and operates beamline 19id-nyx at the national synchrotron light source ii (nsls-ii). Nyx provides the nysbc member institutions and associated investigators with access to synchrotron radiation and instrumentation necessary for collecting crystallographic data on biological macromolecules. Nyx has performed technical and scientific commissioning and started user operations in the spring of 2019. The primary accomplishments of the beamline program for 2024 were upgrades to automation and software and supporting user experiments.

Special projects group: the special projects group at nysbc is a team of expert scientists that performs fee-for-service protein structure determination and protein production services for external clients. In addition, they also receive funding through collaborative research projects with academic and government laboratories. They entered the second year of a five-year niaid contract using structural biology to investigate the etiologic agent for lyme disease, borreliella burgdorferi, to design a vaccine or discover antibody therapeutics against lyme disease. They also continued to participate in structural biology research projects entering the second year of a five-year niaid grant with collaborators at rutgers university investigating ricin and shiga toxins to rationally design better inhibitors against these two toxins. In addition, the team has initiated nih-funded work in a collaborative effort with researchers at virginia commonwealth university that involves structural characterization of a conserved streptococcal membrane protein that affects manganese utilization.rna lab: the rna research conducted at nysbc focuses on understanding how the 3-dimensional structures of rna form and how this structure, conformational dynamics, and interactions with other molecules enable diverse biological function. This nih-funded effort is primarily centered on understanding rnas of viral origin, with particular interest in how these viral rnas interact with the cellular machinery and manipulate that machinery. The rna group consists of researchers at several levels of training and experience, who employ and integrate biochemical, biophysical, structural, and bioinformatic approaches. This research program is world respected and frequently publishes in the highest impact journals.