I will be attending the ENC meeting at Asilomar next week. If anyone would like to meet to discuss anything about the facility, or just to get to know me and put a face with a name, I'll be available throughout the conference. Send me an email, or give me a call and we can work out a meeting place and time. I'll be posting a note at the message board with my email and cell number when I arrive. Hope to meet some of you there!

We are just a few weeks away from being open for business. Most of our testing has concluded and Varian is finishing up with the last of their remaining issues. So now is the time to finish up your proposals and get them to us for approval. If you require some notice to prepare samples and/or travel arrangements, make a note on your application and we will contact you for scheduling. Otherwise we will start scheduling users from day 1.

There have also been some inquiries during our testing phase that I would like to share with everyone:

Q: What sequences do you have available for immediate use?

A: We have the BioPack suite of sequences installed and tested. We have optimized parameter sets for these experiments available as a starting point for initial work on the 900. We also have tested sequences from Lewis Kay's library, but many of these have been optimized for large deuterated molecules and do not work as well with our ubiquitin test sample. These sequences will be available for users by request. All other "in-house" sequences must be pre-screened before being used on the 900.

Q: What is your policy on remote operation?

A: Currently we are not allowing remote operation. Initially we would like all users to visit the facility and go through our orientation program before using the spectrometer. After this initial visit we will consider remote operation applications.

Q: When will the cold probe become available?

A: We have a salt-tolerant cold probe on order from Varian. The current delivery target for the probe is in May. We hope to have the probe installed and tested by the end of the summer, but it is too far in advance to make any specific estimates.

Q: What is the cost for spectrometer time?

A: We are still covered by the NIH grant for the system, so initial costs will reflect our facility expenses only. We have not yet worked out an exact number, but we expect to charge a similar fee as the current cost for the 800 facility in Boulder (approximately $4 an hour).

Q: How much spectrometer time can I request?

A: We are anticipating offering substantial blocks of time to our users so that multiple or long experiments can be run. The actual amount of time will depend on demand, but it is possible that time requests up to 2 weeks long may be accommodated.

I hope this addresses some of your questions, if you have any other inquiries please do not hesitate to ask me and I will do my best to address them. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Testing of the spectrometer is proceeding smoothly and we anticipate being able to open the facility up to users in the coming months. As the facility was funded through a consortium grant, we have established a committee of users that will be in charge of approving projects for the system. All interested users are encouraged to submit an application outlining the proposed project. These proposals will be reviewed by the committee and time will be awarded based on merit and applicability for 900 MHz. Users from within the consortium will be given priority, but proposals from other publicly funded institutions will also be considered.

We request that potential users be available to travel to the facility to collect data, as we will be providing on-site training. Once users have visited the facility and undergone the training program we will consider requests for remote operation of the spectrometer.

We are looking forward to seeing the exciting new projects that you will bring to the facility!

Just a quick update. We've been collecting a lot of data over the past couple of weeks, checking for anything that might be out of place. Varian has sent another probe out to us with an engineer to run some comparisons of the performance of each probe. There are some improvements that we want to see before we move ahead with testing. This will probably slow us down a little, but is to be expected in the installation of such a high-end piece of equipment.

Facility testing has been going on this week as we establish a baseline for the performance of the system in years to come. Our overnight tests of the drift rate are now coming out at less than 3 proton Hz per hour! All of the multi-dimensional protein data that we collected on Ubiquitin is looking great and we can't wait to see some results from a more challenging sample. We have also been able to improve remote access through the campus network so that it will be easier for users to log-in and get their data from afar. The coming months should prove to be very exciting!