NMR Spectrometer

The School houses two (soon to be three) high-field Bruker NMR spectrometers, an AvanceIII-400 widebore, an AvanceIII-600 and an AvanceIII-800 currently under installation, as well as computing facilities for the processing and analysis of NMR data. Both of the 600 and 800 NMR are equipped with cryogenic probeheads.

The four-channel DRX-600 is equipped with a triple resonance (1H/13C/15N; TCI) cryoprobe with a z-gradient and is mainly used for protein structure determination and metabonomics studies. The three-channel DRX-400wb has a high power (1000 gauss/cm) diffusion probe-head and micro-imaging capabilities, as well as two dual (1H/13C and 1H/19F), three-axis gradient triple resonance (1H/13C/15N; TXI), and broadband multinuclear (BBO) probe-heads. This spectrometer is principally used for studies of the biophysical properties of cells, bacterial pathogenesis and characterisation of the mobility of biophysically significant molecules.

These facilities are managed by Dr Ann Kwan, and used primarily by the research groups of Prof. Philip Kuchel (molecular diffusion, metabolic kinetics, membrane transport, and peptide structure), A/Prof. Joel Mackay (protein/nucleic acids structure and interactions), A/Prof. Jacqui Matthews (protein structure), Dr David Gell (protein structure) and Dr Ann Kwan with Dr Margaret Sunde (protein structure and assembly).

Ribbon representations of the structure of p22HBP, a heme-binding protein from mammalian erythrocytes, and of defensin-like-peptide 1 (DLP-1) from the venom of the Australian platypus.