Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The instrument we propose (CD/ORD/Fluorescence spectropolarimeter) is a powerful tool to study biomolecules and these techniques are widely used by researchers to characterize proteins, natural products, enzymes and drugs. One of the very important aspects of the research involving these techniques is the determination of the structure of proteins. The three dimensional structure of proteins determines their vital activity; any alteration of their structure can have serious medical implications. Fluorescence and Circular Dichroism (CD) are essential tools to characterize, investigate and understand the action of all protein based medicine. CD is a form of light absorption spectroscopy; it is the difference between left- and right-circularly polarized light. Typically this difference is very small and very sensitive equipment is needed to measure it. Purity testing of optically active natural products is also an important function that the instrument required will perform. It is clear that this instrument is essential to conduct high quality research on biomolecules but it is also a very high performance spectroscopic instrument. Because of its central location in the chemistry department it will be accessible to all our research personnel and it will be intensively used to investigate fundamental problems in many other areas of chemistry as well.