Protein and Nucleic Acid Services Made-to-Order at PAN Facility

Yen Tran (Photo Credit: Christine Baker, Lotus Pod Designs)

Jessica Tran (Photo Credit: Christine Baker, Lotus Pod Designs)

“One way we distinguish ourselves from outside organizations is that we can, for example, make a lot of unique modifications to oligonucleotides and peptides,” says Dr. Eckart. “We work with researchers to do just about anything they want to do to push the envelope of the different technologies, as long as it doesn’t involve completely disassembling our equipment.”

“Researchers can come into our facility and talk with the folks who are actually making their products or providing the service,” he says. “That allows for scientific dialogue and troubleshooting.”

In addition to standard oligonucleotide and peptide synthesis, for instance, the PAN Facility offers scientists the ability to introduce unique chemical modifications, such as adding fluorescent tags. When researchers ask for other custom services, Dr. Eckart sees it as an opportunity to grow the PAN Facility’s capabilities through the development of new methods or implementation of new technologies.

“There’s an exchange of scientific knowledge that goes on between our staff and the researcher,” he says. “When we work with researchers to develop new applications on existing technology platforms, it often ends up being a win-win, because they can move their project forward and we have a new method that might also help others in the community.”

The PAN Facility, he notes, offers researchers access to key research tools and applications in an efficient and cost-effective manner—all without having to ship scientific cargo through the mail.

Katia Alvarez (Photo Credit: Christine Baker, Lotus Pod Designs)

In recent years, the PAN Facility has increased its spatial transcriptomics capabilities—and that technology is still evolving. Today, the facility has a Visium spatial transcriptomics platform (10x Genomics), but the requirements for the technology application are changing, so the facility is also exploring other options for possible implementation.

“We’re looking for researchers to let us know what spatial technologies are well suited for their biological systems, and then we can look at how we can make that happen,” Dr. Eckart says. “If we don’t have a particular technology yet, we’ll also do all we can to help researchers fulfill their goals elsewhere.”

Another service at PAN that is growing in popularity is surface plasmon resonance (SPR), an optical technique to measure biomolecular interactions in real time and provide information on binding affinity. Researchers using the technology at PAN not only use it for standard protein-protein interaction analysis, but also for determining the binding of small chemical molecules. For example, research teams that are conducting high-throughput screening of chemical compounds to assess their ability to modulate a biological system can use SPR to easily characterize the kinetics of their lead drug candidates.

“This technology is part of the drug discovery pipeline,” says Dr. Eckart.

Brandon Lee (Photo Credit: Christine Baker, Lotus Pod Designs)

Katia Alvarez and Brandon Lee working in a PAN lab. (Photo Credit: Christine Baker, Lotus Pod Designs)

Dr. Eckart encourages scientific teams at Stanford that typically use outside for-profit service companies for their oligonucleotide and protein needs to explore the offerings at the PAN Facility—keeping in mind how experienced and flexible PAN staff are.

For many services, for instance, scientists can enter the technology workflow at just about any point, carrying out as much of their own sample preparation as they want before handing it over to PAN scientists to complete the process.

“We try to be incredibly flexible because we know that researchers understand their cells, tissues, and biological systems better than we do,” says Dr. Eckart.

The PAN Facility is also happy to help with the preparation of next-generation sequencing (NGS) libraries, including quality control for all applications. The facility has a MiSeq instrument that is best suited for small-genome sequencing, targeted resequencing, library QC, and ChIP sequencing (ChIP-seq). For projects that require the sequencing of multiple genomes in a single run, and those that require large amounts of data, deep coverage, or profiling of complex genomes, the PAN Facility can generate the libraries and then submit them to an NGS center for sequencing.

The PAN Facility’s door is always open for researchers who want to chat about how PAN can help them. PAN’s contact information, along with more information on many of the services offered, is available at https://pan.stanford.edu.

PAN equipment (Photo Credit: Christine Baker, Lotus Pod Designs)

PAN equipment (Photo Credit: Christine Baker, Lotus Pod Designs)

For more information (media inquiries only), contact:
Naomi Love
(650) 723-8423
naomi.love@stanford.edu