New Austin facility a 'crucial tool'

A new structural biology facility, opened today at the Austin Research Institute, will be a crucial tool in understanding disease processes and will lead to real benefits for the sufferers of cancer, inflammation and other diseases, according to ARI director Prof Mark Hogarth.

The Helen Macpherson Smith Trust Protein Structure Discovery Facility, which is underpinned by a state-of-the-art Rigaku X-ray crystallography generator, has been in operation since June and is already providing high-quality results much faster than previously, Hogarth said.

Among the success stories so far is the structure of an allele of the Fc receptor linked to autoimmune conditions, and an anticancer therapeutic antibody solved in collaboration with Dr Andrew Scott at the Ludwig Institute.

The installation of the machine came at a great time, according to the head of the structural biology laboratory Dr Paul Ramsland, as it allowed the researchers to maximise their preparations for a recent trip to the Chicago synchrotron.

"We took 32 crystals from eight or nine different projects," Ramsland said, noting that once the Australian synchrotron was up and running at Monash University, it would be even easier to get high-quality protein structures.

The next step for the ARI will be to put into place more automated procedures for protein crystallisation. Currently done by hand, the researchers have been trying out methods in a 96-well format, suitable for robotics. Out of four proteins attempted so far, successful crystals have been made in each case, and three structures have been solved, Ramsland said.

Hogarth said the use of robotics to produce crystals in a high throughput fashion was somewhat controversial. "Some people think that high throughput crystallisation is not useful but at the end of the day, if you can produce [crystals] faster, it's good," he said.

And crystals of lesser quality can still provide useful data, particularly with the sensitivity achieved by the new instrument, he said.

The facility, which cost more than AUD$800,000 to set up, was funded by grants from the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Jack Brockhoff Foundation, the Urquhart Foundation, the Ronald Geoffrey Arnott Foundation and the Scobie and Claire MacKinnon Trust.

It was opened by Victorian Innovation Minister John Brumby.