Laboratory

Three large laboratories (2000 square feet) are dedicated to my research group. One large lab is dedicated to the growth and preparation of the cells including an autoclave, one fast speed and one ultracentrifuge, and the photo-biorector. The Biochemistry lab and the Crystallization lab are divided into a light and dark area, the dark Biochem. Lab. is specially designed for the preparation of Photosynthetic Membrane Proteins with FPLC, HPLC, spectrophotometer, amperometer, gel-elctrophoreses etc. and contains an anaerobic glove box for work with oxygen sensitive samples. The crystallization room (20 o C) and the crystallization cold-room are vibration free and +/- 0.5 C temperature controlled and contain the crystallization equipment including microscopes with digital camera and flash freezing devices for liquid nitrogen and liquid propane.

Computer

The three X-ray crystallographic groups in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry share the hardware as well as the software for data collection, evaluation of the X-ray data, model building, and refinement. For the evaluation of data sets, X-ray structure analysis, modeling, and the theoretical calculations, we have a 300 square feet computer room. The room is equipped with 2 fast Unix systems and software for X-ray structure analysis, and some software for model building and theoretical calculations, which are connected via the net of the department to the workstations of the other two X-ray crystallographic groups. Furthermore my group has several Personal Computers for graphics and text work. Furthermore we have access to the 8-CPU Origin2000 cluster running IRIX 6.5. This cluster is accessible from any computer on campus using a SSH connection.

Office

I occuy a standard chemistry faculty office in close proximity to the laboratories and the large office for my students, with computer work places for up to 12 people. The student office is also used for meetings and seminars of my group.

Major Equipment
The lab contains a large commercial 122 l Photo-bioreactor which allows growth up to 250g cyanobacteria / week under well-defined conditions. We are well equipped with biochemical equipment for the isolation and crystallization of PS II with a Sorvall RC-2B centrifuge, an ultracentrifuge with fixed angle and one swinging bucket rotors. The biochemical equipment includes all necessary standard equipment such as balances, a spectrophotometer, an automatic SDS gel-electrophoreses system (Phast System Amersham), an FPLC (Amersham) and HPLC with four wavelength detector (Knauer), pH-meters, Eppendorff centrifuge, an amperometer and spectrophotometer. The Departmental X-ray facility, to which my group has unlimited access, is equipped with a Rigako X-ray generator (rotating anode), Rigako image plate detector and a cryo-system (100K).