New equipment for protein – small molecule interaction studies

Our lab has recently obtained state-of-the-art equipment for studying biomolecular interactions based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR, Biacore T200 instrument) and isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC, MicroCal iTC200 instrument) techniques. Both instruments will facilitate our drug discovery efforts, in particular, the Biacore T200 will be used for fragment screening and the MicroCal iTC200 will aid in structure-based design. Importantly, these methods are very much complementary to NMR and in many cases provide a (better) alternative to tasks such as fragment library screening and determination of binding affinities and thermodynamics.