Within Pharmaceutical Chemistry
The Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry is housed on West Campus
in the Simons Research
Laboratories, a state-of-the art 30,000 net square foot two-story research
facility, which was completed and occupied in January 1996. In addition
to eighteen general laboratories, the facility houses several specialty
laboratories: an experimental cancer chemotherapeutic agent testing laboratory;
a radioisotope handling room; a molecular biology laboratory; a natural
products extraction laboratory; and a liquid chromatography mass spectrometry
laboratory.
The building is designed along industrial lines with researcher desk
areas and interaction areas adjacent to the laboratories. All offices,
desk areas and laboratories are connected to a state-of-the-art computer
network that accesses, among others, the central computational facility,
the library system and the internet. Both Macintosh and PC microcomputer
platforms are available and supported. The laboratories
contain an extensive array of equipment and instrumentation that is maintained
for faculty and student research, including incubators and laminar flow
hoods for cell and tissue culture, numerous high pressure liquid chromatographs,
several capillary electrophoresis systems, calorimetric equipment, thermal
analysis instrumentation, a circular dichroism spectrophotometer for the
analysis of protein conformation, instrumentation to perform time-resolved
and static fluorescence , an FTIR and light scattering instrumentation
that can perform static and dynamic measurements. The department
also maintains a small library of books and current periodicals.
Research Support at the University Level
In addition to the well equipped laboratories within the Department
of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, there are numerous research support laboratories
across the university that are equipped with sophisticated large instrumentation
and/or highly specialized research equipment. These laboratories, all staffed
by trained personnel, assist the researcher in conducting various specialized
experiments.
Molecular Structures
Group
The Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance Laboratory provides access to modern high field FT NMR
spectrometers. There are three hands-on instruments (GE 300 MHz,
Bruker Avance 400 MHz, Varian 300 MHZ) that feature various aspects such
as a automatic sample changer, to magic angle spinning experiments for
high-resolution solids spectra. The fourth instrument (Brucker 500
MHz) is used principally for two-dimensional or more complex experiments.
The laboratory also houses three Silicon Graphics workstations for off-line
processing or plotting NMR data from any of the instruments and for computational
chemistry applications.
The Mass Spectrometry
Laboratory contains several state-of-the-art instruments that are
available for structural identification including exact mass determination,
plus hyphenated instrumentation including GC-MS and LC-MS-MS equipped with
the various modern interfaces and data manipulation software needed for
advanced biomedical research problems.
The Molecular Graphics
and Molecular Modeling Laboratory is equipped to perform simulations
of molecular mechanics and molecular dynamics. The laboratory provides
access to high-performance computational tools. It supports and assists
KU researchers through consultation and training in their independent application
of computational chemistry approaches to specific problems. The
X-ray Crystallographic Laboratory can determine three-dimensional
structures of unknown molecules at atomic resolution using single-crystal
X-ray diffraction methods. The laboratory is equipped with a single
crystal X-ray diffractometer with a 12KW rotating anode X-ray generator
that can be used down to -160 °C for thermally labile samples.
The Microscopy
and Electronic Imaging Laboratory
This laboratory provides scanning and transmission electron microscopes
and a laser scanning confocal light microscope for use by researchers in
the biological, chemical, geological, pharmaceutical and engineering sciences.
It also has facilities for computer-assisted image analysis and presentation
graphics.
The Biochemical
Services Research Laboratory
The BSRL assists KU researchers by providing a expertise in a variety
of specialized biochemical research methods. The laboratory has the
facilities for culture of organisms, protein isolation and purification,
amino acid analysis, DNA sequencing, peptide synthesis and TOF-MS characterization
of large molecules.
In addition to the above named specialized laboratories, The University
of Kansas maintains an accredited Animal
Care Facility that is located on the lower two floors of Malott
Hall. Ordering, housing, and caring for animals are centralized and
coordinated by the veterinarian and the animal care staff. An Instrument
Design Laboratory collaborates with research groups in the development
of special-purpose laboratory computers. The
Academic Computing Services Facility has several multiuser systems
on a campus network supporting research activities. Included are
a three-processor Alpha 4100 system running Digital UNIX (LARK), available
to all faculty, students, and staff. On a restricted basis, a 16-processor
Silicon Graphics (SGI) Origin 200 (HERON) and a four-processor SGI Origin
200 (PELICAN) are available. Other systems are available for general
purpose and academic computing. The recently opened Marian
and Fred Anschutz Science Library contains more than 200,000 volumes
covering chemistry, biology, geology, pharmacy, and physics. Both
the science library and the department are equipped for computer searching
of numerous commercial data bases that among others including Chemical
Abstracts, Science Citation Index and Medline.
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