Keen Hall is a 10,000-square-foot instrumentation facility that offers expertise and instrumentation in microscopy/imaging, proteomics and genomics and chemical biology.

• The Genomics Core Facility provides technical, instrument, and professional development and next generation sequencing, gene expression services, flow cytometry.
• The Proteomics Core Facility has a series of instruments for protein separation, sample preparation, and mass spectrometry analyses.
• The Microscopy and Imaging Core Facility provides a comprehensive suite of confocal microscopes and supporting peripheral equipment with high throughput imaging capability and a range of optical imaging applications.
• The Chemical Screening Facilities feature diverse chemical libraries, robotics and cheminformatics that support the core facilities. Instruments include two BioTek Precision 2000 liquid-handling robots in laminar flow hoods for clean work and a Beckman Coulter Biomek FX double bridge fluid handling robot with Cytomat hotel, for library management and distribution. Compounds collections are available from commercial sources.
• For follow up and SAR studies, the ChemMine Web Tools package  is an online service for analyzing and clustering small molecules by structural similarities, physicochemical properties or custom data types. Compounds structures can be imported into the workbench by simple copy/paste, local files or from a PubChem search.

Quantitative FRET Technology Platform for High-Throughput Screening and Drug Characterizations

A novel quantitative Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) methodology has been developed using one-sample method for both basic kinetics parameter determinations and high-throughput screening (HTS) assays in Associate Professor of Bioengineering Jiayu Liao’s group at UCR's Bourns College of Engineering.

The FRET assay has been widely used in various biological research in vitro and in vivo. However, the quantitative FRET assay has not been fully established due to the complexity of FRET signal. We have developed a novel approach to determine the absolute FRET signal in a three-step procedure using cross-wavelength correlation coefficiency method and then correlate the absolute FRET signal with the molecular events of various biochemical reactions in SUMOylation cascade for their kinetic parameter determinations.

Ubiquitin-like protein pathways, such as SUMOylation, are critical in protein homeostasis and activities in vivo and are emerging as a novel strategy to treat many acute and chronic human diseases, such as anti-infections and cancers. The high-throughput screening (HTS) assay has also been developed and applied in a HTS campaign for more than 220,000 compounds and a specific SUMO inhibitor was discovered and characterized in both anti-influenza virus assay and anti-cancer assays. The methodologies have very broad applications for other biological pathways, such as small molecule immunological checkpoint inhibitor discovery.