In order to meet increasing demands from both NIH intramural and extramural communities for access to a small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) resource, the Center for Cancer Research (CCR) under the leadership of Jeffrey Strathern and Bob Wiltrout established a partnership user program (PUP) with the Argonne National Laboratory Photon Source in October 2008.
This PUP agreement secures a certain percentage of the Argonne synchrotron beam time for biomedical research.
In 2013, CCR established the CCR SAXS Core facility with Dr. Yun-Xing Wang as the core’s head and Dr. Xianyang Fang as its first full-time staff member to better serve these communities.
In 2014, Dr. Lixin Fan was recruited to succeed Dr. Fang, who took a faculty position at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The SAXS Core Facility includes an in-house state-of-art SAXS instrument (BioSAXS-2000) and routine access to beamtime from the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab through the PUP agreement. The SAXS Core Facility is open to all NIH intramural and extramural research communities and serving CCR researchers is our top priority.
Our Mission
The mission of the SAXS Core facility is to provide support to research projects from CCR principle investigators (PIs), NIH intramural PIs and extramural academic research groups/laboratories. The support includes providing routine access to the APS PUP SAXS/WAXS beamline and in-house SAXS instrument, and expertise in experimental design, data collection, processing, analysis and interpretation. Our main focus is to determine structure of biomacromolecules and their complexes in solution. The research field includes but not limited to structural studies of nucleic acids, proteins, protein assemblies, virus particles, lipid membranes, protein/DNA and protein/RNA complexes.
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