Skip to main content
Center for Structural Biology

How We Work

There are three general ways that user labs interface with us.

Fee for service

The core facility has all the expertise and equipment necessary to independently tackle your PEP project. Our staff are fully capable of taking your protein expression and purification project from inception to product.

Collaborative Project

The core facility lab can act as your collaborator. We get intellectually invested in your project as well as provide mentoring and supervision to your staff that will be working in the core facility. We will work alongside and mentor your personnel, help them with experimental design and analysis, as well as aid your lab with grant writing and manuscript preparation.

At any time you can adjust how you interface with us, our mission is to help you accomplish your research goals in whatever way is best for you.

Rigor and Reproducibility

Rigor and reproducibility are crucial to your research aims, and they are becoming greater factors in securing critical grant funding opportunities. There are eight steps to Rigorous and Reproducible Experiments in Biomolecular Research at UNC:

  1. If using a core facility, consult with the core staff in the planning stage. Consult with a statistician if you need help developing a Power Analysis to assure that your results will be adequately powered.
  2. Design your experiment with sufficient controls (rigor) and replicates (reproducibility).
  3. Assure that ALL of your reagents (antibodies, cell lines, mice) are fully validated (see below).
  4. Have a clear and detailed protocol (SOP) and data analysis plan that can be easily followed. Assure that the protocol is strictly followed or that any deviation is well documented.
  5. Assure that the staff or students performing the experiment are well trained and understand each step and the importance of performing them precisely (rigor again).
  6. Use only well-maintained instrumentation, preferably maintained and operated in a core facility with expert staff (see #1 above).
  7. Document all steps, reagents, equipment and data analysis methods used in the experiment. Assure that the both the documentation and the data itself are properly stored in a safe data management repository.
  8. Acknowledge the Cancer Center Support Grant (P30 CA016086), Grant-supported instrumentation and core staff in publications.You may use this as a template for wording in your grants and publications to address Rigor and Reproducibility for your research proteins generated by the the UNC Protein Expression and Purification Core Facility. We can also provide statements to this effect in Letters of Support for your grant applications.