The Drennan Laboratory

On August 25, 2008, the lab said goodbye to its old location in Building 56 and moved to Building 68, Room 680. Now in the MIT Koch Biology Building, the lab is directly above to the upcoming dedicated X-ray crystallography facility; as such, we have discontinued the use of our previous X-ray equipment.

The Wet Lab
Our new space has 12 desks and 12 benches in three connected lab modules, a molecular biology room (the "Mo/Mol-Bio Room"), a room housing equipment for crystal manipulation and inspection (the "Crystal Room"), a cold room, and two adjoining rooms for our chemicals, two centrifuges, shaking incubators, freezers, balances, and storage cabinets. We currently have three Coy anaerobic glove boxes: two four-gloved units are housed in the main lab areas, and one two-gloved unit is located in the cold room. Additional equipment includes: four fume hoods, two FPLC appartuses, one HPLC, electrophoresis equipment, five microscopes with polarimeters, two UV-Vis spectrophotometers, benchtop centrifuges, Speed-Vacs, several mini-refrigerators, scintillation counter, and a gas manifold.

In addition, the Drennan Laboratory has access to the Department of Chemistry Instrumentation Facility. The facility has four permanent staff members who provide instrument training, maintenance, repair and applications assistance to users. The lab currently houses six NMR spectrometers, one EPR spectrometer, one high resolution mass spectrometer, a GC-MS, a polarimeter, a CD spectrophotometer, and two FT-IR spectrometers.

We also have access to MIT Biophysical Instrumentation Facility in 18-511. This facility houses an analytical ultracentrifuge, a light scattering instrument, circular dichroism spectrometer, isothermal titration calorimeter, differential scanning calorimeter, and a Bio Assay Reader.

X-ray facility
As we await the completion of the X-ray facility in Building 68, below is desciption of our previous facility in Building 56.

The X-ray lab consists of two rooms. One humidity controlled room houses two Mar345 image plate detectors that are mounted on a Rigaku RU-300 X-ray generator. On one port the X-ray beam is focused by a set of high performance double-focusing mirror systems designed by John Genova from Harvard University. The second port will focus the beam using multilayer optics from Osmic, Inc.. Ambient, 4°C and cryogenic temperature data collection experiments are possible using both in-house and an Oxford CryoSystems apparatus. A large benchtop work area provides ample space for sample preparation, cryotesting and flash-cooling of samples for data collection. Each Mar345 is controlled by a linux workstation (AMD K7 650 MHz processor) that has over 20 GB of disk storage space for raw images. The linux workstations are kept in the adjacent room.

We also have access to a newly purchased crystallization robot in Building 68.