Ultra-cool addition to Keele equipment
The Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine has invested over £60,000 in state-of-the-art, low temperature and cryo-cooling equipment to upgrade its Xcalibur X-ray Diffraction equipment, based in the Huxley Building.
Funding came from the HEFCE Capital Equipment Fund, via the Faculty of Health, and will represent a long-term saving, as the current liquid nitrogen system is expensive and labour-intensive to run, whereas the new cryo-attachment abstracts nitrogen from ambient air.
The Xcalibur XRD was commissioned at Keele in 2007, for the in-house experiments of the University's structural biology programme, led by Professor Trevor Greenhough and Dr Annette Shrive. These in turn complement the regular work carried out by Keele staff at the DIAMOND Light Source in Oxfordshire. The new cryo-cooler takes samples down to -100K and six Keele research groups will directly benefit from the resulting technology, savings and efficiencies.
Keele's recent time on the large national DIAMOND facility has been officially valued at £1million and Keele leads the rolling programme grant to the Midlands UK Protein Crystallography Consortium, involving the universities of Keele, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham and Birmingham.