Basic Sciences

The Macromolecular Crystallography and X-Ray Diffraction facility provides support in crystallization as well as X-ray diffraction data collection of macromolecules such as proteins or protein complexes. Furthermore, the facility also provides training in crystallization, crystal picking and mounting on X-ray diffractometer to scientists and research scholars of ACTREC and those from other national laboratories.

The equipment in the facility includes:

• Crystallization unit: vibration free incubator for setting up the crystallization using hanging and sitting drop vapor diffusion methods
• Microscope: to visualize the crystals
• Microstar Microfocus Rotating Anode
• Integrated computer controller motorized image plate detector
• computers 

At present, three research labs of ACTREC (Bose Lab, Prasanna Lab and Varma Lab) are active users of the facility. In 2017, Prasanna lab has collected high resolution data. This year, ~ 15 crystals of different proteins were mounted for X-ray diffraction analysis.