Dozens of test tubes in a holder

IBBR Commons

To support the joint research program, IBBR maintains a world-class instrumentation and facility to support development and advancement of bioscience measurements applied to basic and applied research. These world-class capabilities are maintained and operated to facilitate shared access, support collaboration and maximize the research impact of the infrastructure through an organizational structure we have termed the ‘IBBR Research Commons’.

Each of the Commons laboratories are accessible to all partners and collaborators and be supported by staff experts and managers that will manage facilities, support and advance measurements and methods and facilitate collaboration.

The IBBR currently supports the operation of a number of state-of-art, high precision instruments either funded by NIST or jointly with the University of Maryland and sited at IBBR, including

  • One 900 MHz and two 600 MHz NMRs alongside a number of benchtop NMR systems
  • An HDX-mass spectrometer (MS)
  • A Small Angle X-Ray Scattering (SAXS) instrument
  • X-ray Diffraction (XRD) instruments
  • Two cryo-electron microscopes (cryoEMs)

The IBBR also supports NMR equipment and other services within the CBT at the IBBR including a 400 MHz NMR, but is also partially located in Baltimore including a 950 MHz, 800 MHz and 600 MHz NMR instrument. All of the shared services of the CBT will also available as part of the new ‘IBBR Commons’ organization structure, even though some of these capabilities are located in Baltimore. Additionally, IBBR houses four analytical mass spectrometers (two on loan through CRADA arrangements with Agilent and SCIEX) that are used in tandem with Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) and ultra-high-performance high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) separations instruments. The IBBR has undertaken a number of laboratory renovations to support the installation and proper siting of these instruments at IBBR.

Lastly, IBBR maintains and support a dedicated scientific computer cluster; with 836 compute cores, 49 high-end GPS and 10Gbe interconnects, the cluster has data storage in excess of 1 PB and Globus interconnects for data transfer off-campus. Software is maintained for parallelized data processing, analysis and molecular modeling and dynamics calculations and remote access is available via the Thinlink client.