A support system for scientific research incorporating public sharing of facilities plays an integral part in supporting innovation within the Institute of Biophysics. It plays a significant role in improving standards of scientific research, promoting interdisciplinary research and training of highly qualified scientists. The Institute established the ‘Chinese Academy of Sciences Protein Science core facility center’ in line with the requirements laid out in the “Eleventh 5-year plan” for national science and technology core facility establishment.
The construction of the core facility center began in late 2004. The center was officially opened in 2008 and has become the largest CAS biological instrument platform in the Beijing area. The center is responsible for the running and maintenance of scientific instruments, and for providing technical support for the institute’s research. In a spirit of "integrating, sharing, improving and making progress”, the center provides services to other institutions throughout the country and internationally, thus maximizing instrument usage efficiency and sharing research and technological resources.
The center has a technical support team composed of 41 technicians and is led by chief technical experts. It currently has about 50 large pieces of equipment, including a 300 Kilovolts field emission transmission cryon electron microscope, a 7-Tesla NMR image system, a high-speed laser sorting flow cytometer, a high flux X-ray diffractometer FRE for collecting data for protein crystal structure determination, a 600- MHz NMR spectrometer, an ultra-high resolution structure illumination fluorescent microscope, a series of mass spectrometers for proteomics, lipidomics and metabolomics, including 2D-LC LTQ OrbitrapXL high resolution mass spectrometer, 2D-LC ESI Q-TOF high resolution mass spectrometer, 2D-LC ESI LTQ mass spectrometer, LC-ESI-Triple-Quadrupole TSQ Vantage mass spectrometer, LC-ESI-Triple-Quadrupole (6460) mass spectrometer, Matrix-assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Time-of-flight mass spectrometer (MALDI-TOF-MS), and a large experimental animal center which meets national safety standards. The center provides services and consultation for more than 100 external research projects. It organizes meetings and offers technical training courses to researchers and graduate students to enhance their technical skills.
Besides running machines, the center endeavors to develop improved scientific research methods and innovations in scientific instrumentation. A series of instrument upgrade and innovation projects have been launched and have seen significant achievements. IBP’s Core Facilities have become one of the top life science instrument centers in China.
The website of the center is http://cf.ibp.ac.cn
Administrator of Center:
Xiang Wang （王翔）
Assistant Administrator of Center:
Xuemei Li（李雪梅）
Chief Scientists of Center:
Fuquan Yang（杨福全）
Xuemei Li（李雪梅）
Yong Tian（田勇）
Core Facility Center
Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
15 Datun Load, Chaoyang District
Beijing 100101, China
Tel: 8610-64888442
Fax: 8610-64871293
