Chad Rienstra has led a team of researchers at UIUC to receive a NIH High End Instrumentation grant for $1,936,449, which will be used to purchase a high-field solid-state NMR spectrometer to be housed in the School of Chemical Sciences NMR Facility. The new instrument will be one of the most powerful NMR spectrometers available worldwide, enabling the determination of atomic-resolution structures of membrane proteins, fibrils and nanocrystalline proteins.
Major users of the new instrument include eight other professors at UIUC: Eric Oldfield, Stephen Sligar, Robert Gennis, Mary Schuler, James Morrissey, Martin Burke, Wilfred van der Donk, and Julia George. Collaborative projects among these UIUC investigators aim to solve structures of proteins that are central to Parkinson's disease, diabetes, drug metabolism, blood clotting, antibiotic resistance and HIV/AIDS.
Atomic resolution structural information is the key to rational drug design. Unfortunately for many proteins, standard methods such as solution NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography are not suitable. Solid-state NMR techniques developed by Rienstra will enable these structures to be solved for the first time, utilizing customized, state-of-the-art magic-angle spinning probes to obtain data with the highest possible resolution and sensitivity.
The NIH High End Instrumentation grant program is competed every other year; as part of the 2008 program, NIH has recently awarded a total of $33 million to 20 teams of NIH-supported investigators nation-wide. The awards will be used to obtain instrumentation ranging in acquisition cost from $750,000 to $2,000,000, such as supercomputers, cyclotrons, electron microscopes, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, mass spectrometers, and NMR spectrometers. More information about this NIH program and the other awards is found at http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jul2008/ncrr-16.htm (the NIH awards announcement press release).