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 as a state-of-the art facility featuring researcher desk areas and interaction areas adjacent to the laboratories. All offices, desk areas and laboratories are connected to an institution-wide 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 performance 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 select library of books and current periodicals.

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.

Several department faculty members are affiliated with a major university research organization known as the Higuchi Biosciences Centers. Some graduate students participate in interdisciplinary research being conducted in this family of research centers focusing on basic biomedical problems, bioanalytical chemistry, drug design, drug delivery systems, neurological sciences, immunology, or related biotechnology. Within the family of centers, some are designated as State Centers of Excellence and are closely tied to the generation of products directed to commercial applications. Basic research supported by university, state, federal, and private foundation funding is also conducted at the centers. These activities are primarily focused on interdisciplinary problems in the biomedical sciences with special emphasis on molecular and cellular approaches.