X-ray Diffractometer is Operational

For the past 20+ years, students doing crystallography projects in Prof. Arthur Glasfeld‘s [1989-] lab have relied on instrumentation made available to them by generous friends at OHSU.  That will remain true, except the OHSU instrumentation will now live at Reed.  As the structural biologists at OHSU have shifted to electron microscopy, thanks in large part to an NIH national facility housed at the university, the x-ray set-up was no longer getting much use. Through the generosity of Peter Barr-Gillespie ’81, the chief research officer at OHSU, the instrument was donated to Reed this Fall. Together with Randy Hicks (laboratory & department manager) and Rob Jensen (instrumentation chemist), Arthur spent the early part of this month setting up the device in its new home in the Chemistry building.

Arthur describes the instrument and its capabilities as follows: “We now have a fully functional single crystal x-ray system with a cryo-system for flash cooling crystals and doing data collection at cryogenic temperatures. Four successful data sets have already been collected from test protein crystals and from the independent study project of Dorothy Cheng ’20. We can also collect data on small molecule crystals, and I hope to learn more about processing that data and doing structure solutions in the coming weeks.”

This instrument complements the x-ray powder diffractometer that had been the department’s sole method for performing diffraction experiments for many years.

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