Biacore® instrumentation is available for your use in the Biosensor Core Facility maintained by the Department of Physiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. Biacore® sensor technology provides a versatile, highly sensitive, easy-to-use, and quantitative approach to study the kinetics and affinity of binding interactions under exquisitely controlled conditions. The technology relies on “surface plasmon resonance“, small changes in the interaction of monochromatic light with a metallic surface that occur when a protein or other molecule binds to that surface. Many different kinds of binding reactions can be studied. Extensive sets of binding curves can be obtained robotically. User-friendly software is available for curve-fitting and extraction of kinetic constants. Many different surface chemistries are available that are compatible with a wide range of ligands and binding reactions. Ligands can be proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, or carbohydrates. The size of the macromolecules to be studied is usually not limiting, and the technology allows all measurements to be made “label-free.”
The Biacore® 3000 and Biacore® T200 instruments housed in the Biosensor Core Facility (Room 611, Health Science Facility II) are accessible to faculty, students, fellows and staff members at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Consultations to determine if its applications are appropriate for your studies can be obtained from the Core Operator, Dr. Yinghua Zhang or the Core Director, Dr. Robert Bloch. User fees, assessed for machine time, are low by national standards; supplies are provided approximately at cost. Services provided by the Core are also available to researchers at other universities and in the biotech industry, though at higher cost. For more information, please contact Dr. Zhang or Dr. Bloch.