Owens Research Group

Laboratory Facilities

The 1100 square foot Owens Group laboratory is well-equipped for MALDI research. Most MALDI experiments are conducted on a donated commercial Bruker Reflex III reflectron TOFMS system. The standard nitrogen laser on the system has been supplemented with a Continuum, Inc. Minilite I Nd:YAG laser equipped with both 2nd and 3rd harmonic generation crystals. The lab is also home to two custom-built, single-sample at a time linear MALDI TOFMS instruments. Everyday method development as well as routine samples are now run on the Reflex III instrument. Additional laser equipment in the Owens laboratory includes a Lambda Physik LPX105i excimer laser coupled with a Lambda Physik LPD3002 dye laser (with second harmonic generation crystals to cover the wavelength range of 220-900nm), and two Laser Science, Inc. 337ND near-diffraction limited nitrogen lasers. One of the custom-built TOF instruments was designed to allow a single sample to be simultaneously interrogated with both a nitrogen laser and excimer/dye laser beam. Routine laser diagnostic equipment, including fast photodiodes, power meters and beam profilers are also available. Routine MALDI sample storage and preparation equipment such as freezers, micro-centrifuges, speed-vacs, and several electrospray deposition setups, are also available within the laboratory.

Departmental Facilities

The department maintains a professionally staffed mass spectrometry facility available to all members of the university community. Instrumentation includes a recently donated Waters AutoSpec M high-resolution magnetic sector MS (with fast atom bombardment, electrospray ionization, desorption chemical ionization and electron impact capability), and thanks to the NSF CRIF program a soon-to-be purchased commercial MALDI TOFMS system. Samples may be submitted for analysis or users may be trained in operation of the instruments for use in long-term projects. The professionally staffed and newly expanded Chemistry Department NMR facility is equipped with 300MHz and 500MHz Varian Unity Inova NMR systems; both instruments have multi-nuclear capability. The probe on the 500 MHz instrument is a cryogenically cooled triple resonance model (1H {13C/15N}) suitable for protein analysis. The recently renovated and freshly equipped (November 2005) departmental Analytical Instrumentation Laboratory is equipped with the usual array of open-access chemical analysis instrumentation, including: two Perkin-Elmer (PE) Spectrum One Fourier-transform infrared absorption spectrometers, each with a universal diamond ATR accessory, a PE Lambda-35 UV/visible spectrometer, A PE Lambda-950 UV/visible/NIR spectrometer with a 60mm diameter diffuse-reflectance integrating sphere, a PE model 343 polarimeter, a PE LS55B luminescence spectrometer, a PE Clarus 500 capillary-column GC with dual FID detectors, a Clarus 500 capillary-column GC/MS system (with electron impact capability), a PE Series 200 Quaternary HPLC development system with UV/visible photodiode array detector, a PE series 200 binary HPLC system equipped with a recently donated Sciex API2000 triple quadrupole mass spectrometer, a PE series 2000 binary Gel Permeation Chromatography system with refractive index detector, and a Varian AA240FS flame atomic absorption spectrometer equipped with a GTA-120 graphite furnace accessory.

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Last modified September 15, 2009

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