About

State-of-the-art facilities for structural biology & molecular immunology research

The Sgourakis Lab is located on the 9th floor of the Colket Translational Research Building (CTRB), at a shared space between the Center for Computational and Genomic Medicine (CCGM) and Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. We are affiliated with the Institute of Structural Biology (ISB).

Colket Sgourakis Lab
Colket Translational Research Building

Facilities

We house facilities for recombinant protein expression in multiple systems, protein purification and biochemical/biophysical characterization, including data analysis and high-end computational modeling. Functional characterization is carried out using multiple immunoassays conducted in Sgourakis Lab and the CHOP Flow Cytometry facility.

Equipment

The Sgourakis Lab has routine access to state-of-the-art facilities for biomolecular NMR and X-ray crystallography which include a 600 MHz AvanceNeo system with a TCI cryoprobe (Bruker), and an Oryx crystallization Robot (Douglas Instruments). Complementary in-house biophysical assays include a microcal VP-ITC isothermal titration calorimeter and SpectraMax multi-mode microplate reader for various fluorescence-based detection assays. Additional facilities for SPR, ITC, AUC, MALS, protein crystallography and mass spectrometry are available the Johnson Foundation Structural Biology & Biophysics Core and the Wistar Institute. High-field NMR access is readily available at several instruments in the local NMR community. 

The Center for Computational and Genomic Medicine at CHOP has unlimited access to a 90 Node HPC which also include 4 NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU 16GB GPUs. Combined, the cluster has 12.5TB RAM, 4,496 Cores, and direct access to over 3PB of Network Attached Storage over dedicated 80Gb inter-switch connections. The CHOP Research Institute has a significant investment in a VMware Virtual environment comprised of 50 servers with a total 10 TB of RAM, 1640 GHZ of processing power and 100 Terabytes of disk space.

600 MHz NMR system at Blockley Hall / NMR UPenn

Research Highlights

CHOP Researchers Discover Deep Structural Biology Connections that Help Improve CAR Therapy

CHOP Researchers Uncover Molecular Basis of Antigen Processing for Cancer Target MR1

Snapshot Science: Does a New Method Tackle the NMR Challenge of Large Proteins?

More updates can be found on our Twitter/X: @SgourakisLab

The lab at the American Association of Immunologists conference in DC (May 2023).

Lab dinner to celebrate Julia’s admission into Drexel Medicine (June 2023)!