The Drennan Laboratory

We are located in the MIT Koch Biology Building (68-680 or 694), directly above the X-ray crystallography facility.

The Wet Lab
Our space in building 68 has 12 desks and 12 benches in three connected lab modules, a molecular biology room (the "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 two Coy anaerobic glove bags housed in the main lab areas. We will soon be adding a MBraun box to our cold room to allow anaerobic purification and manipulaton of crystals at 4 ºC. Additional equipment includes: four fume hoods, FPLC setup, HPLC setup shared with the Nolan Lab in bldg 56, 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 68-470. 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
We regularly travel to Synchrotron facilities around the United States for data collection, including NE-CAT at the Advanced Photon Source (APS, Chicago, IL); X26C, X25 and X21 at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS, Brookhaven, NY); and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) beamlines at the Advanced Light Source (ALS, Berkely, CA).

For in-house screening of crystals and single-wavelength anomalous data collection we are fortunate to have a well equipped X-ray diffraction setup shared among our lab and several others in building 68. This setup includes two image plate detectors, two cryostream setups, and an off-line microspectrophotometer for UV-visible spectroscopy of crystals. The diffraction equipment is maintained by a permanent staff member.

Crystallization facility
The crystallization facility is housed in building 68 and includes an Art Robbins Phoenix robot for micropipetting (down to 100 nL), a Formulatrix Formulator robot for generation of custom screens, and two Formulator hotels for crystal storage and automated imaging at 18 ºC and 4 ºC. The facility is shared among crystallography labs in building 68 and is managed by full time staff.

In addition to the shared equipment, we have a Mosquito robot inside a MBraun glovebox for anaerobic crystallization screen. Imaging of trays in the anaerobic chamber is facilitated by a imaging robot inside the box.