About Us
It is our pleasure to welcome users to the Physical Biochemistry Instrumentation Facility at Indiana University, Bloomington. Over the past several years there has been a rapid increase on our campus of research into the structures, stabilities and interactions of biomolecules. This state-of-the-art facility has been established to facilitate and encourage these research endeavors and to provide a centralized resource for training and education in modern physical biochemistry. In total, there are 15 instruments within the facility. Just to name a few, some instrumentation and their application include: 1) the fluorometer for analysis of structure, folding, binding thermodynamics and kinetics; 2) isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) for measuring thermodynamics of molecular binding; and 3) dynamic light scattering (DLS) for deducing particle size distributions, diffusion coefficients, and molecular weight information. We hope that other Academic and Commercial research organizations in the region will also benefit from the PBIF.
The Physical Biochemistry Instrumentation Facility would not exist without the strong support of Faculty and administrators at Indiana University. Unwavering support from Carl Bauer, Chair of the Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry Dept., former Dept. of Chemistry Chair David Clemmer, and former Dept. of Biology Chair Jeffrey Palmer provided the initial funds for this uniquely equipped and valuable resource. Many IU faculty members (past and present) have written shared instrumentation grants and/or contributed from their own research funds to allow the purchase of state-of-the-art instrumentation housed in the PBIF. These include the Stopped Flow Spectrometer, the Multi-angle Light Scattering Instrument and Reactive Index Detector, and the RT-PCR instruments. Extramural funding for the Facility instruments has come from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, with intramural matching funds from Research and the University Graduate School (RUGS) and the Departments of Chemistry and Biology. Through such funds, we are happy to announce our newly installed Microscale Thermophoresis instrument.
Last, but by no means least, we would like to thank the several generations of graduate students and postdoctoral associates who have already made a number of exciting discoveries using the Facility instruments. It is my hope that the Physical Biochemistry Instrumentation Facility will contribute to the educational experience and joy of discovery by present and future students and postdocs as well as encouraging new collaborative interactions between labs within the departments here at IU, along with other academic institutions as well as commercial entities.
Giovanni Gonzalez-Guiterrez, Ph.D., Facility Manager