Core Facilities--The Real Revolution in Biotechnology
While much has been deservedly written about recent technological advances with regards to oligonucleotide and peptide synthesis, protein and DNA sequencing and the mass spectrometric analysis of peptides and proteins, much less has been said about the extremely positive impact that core facilities have had on the availability and use of these state-of-the-art technologies. In order to determine an NH2-terminal sequence ten years ago not only did you have to isolate at least 1,000-fold more protein than today but you also had to find either a good friend or a collaborator who was fortunate enough to have a sequencer and who was willing to run your sample. Those few facilities that were in existence were, I believe, most likely supported by program projects and hence, they rightly gave low (or no) priority to carrying out analyses for investigators not in the program. That there has been a substantial increase in the number of core facilities over the last several years is strongly suggested by the fact that the number of ABRF facilities has increased from 103 in 1988 to 236 in 1992. This increase has been driven by the realization that core facilities provide an extremely efficient means of ensuring that sophisticated and, usually very expensive instrumentation is fully utilized, is well maintained and is operated by highly trained professionals whose major goal is to ensure that investigators at their institutions have access to absolutely state-of-the-art bioanalytical and synthetic services. For as we are all well aware, the success of a core facility ultimately depends upon the success of its users. Of course, this definition of a core facility ignores the many other contributions made by these units. An informal survey of only a few core facility directors reveals that over the last few weeks they have begun to prepare shared instrumentation grants (as core facilities are generally not only expected to operate biotechnological instruments but also to acquire the funds to enable their purchase), written their own RO1 competitive renewals as well as prepared letters of support for their user's RO1 grant applications, explained the difference between affinity and free energy of association, provided critical comments on user's manuscripts and grant proposals as well as reviewed several manuscripts for journals, designed synthetic peptide analogues (that had a reasonable chance of being soluble in something besides 6 M guanidine HCl), prepared and given lectures and seminars, devised a protocol for a protein:protein cross-linking study, responded to inquiries concerning mass spectrometry and it's applicability to specific research projects, evaluated the significance of proposed sequence homologies, diagnosed a problem related to purifying a covalent peptide:nucleic acid adduct, developed purification strategies for a tumor antigen and an RNA binding protein, designed oligonucleotide probes and PCR primers, referred an investigator with a question concerning peptide-nucleic acids to an "outside" expert, attended several institutional meetings to provide protein chemistry expertise and spent untold and undocumented hours helping investigators devise appropriate procedures for preparing samples for protein chemistry and answering questions regarding the interpretation of amino acid analysis, DNA and protein sequencing data. I am certain that every facility director and staff member reading this note could easily put together a similarly diverse and, probably even longer, litany of their last few week's activities.
The point, of course, is that core facilities provide the basic underpinning that supports the biomedical research effort. I suspect there are few investigators in biomedical research who do not at one time or another depend upon a core facility to supply a critical oligomer, analytical service, or an expert opinion. Webster's defines the word "core" as, "the central or innermost part" or "the most important part." Occasionally, users of core facilities, the administrators that oversee the establishment and partial funding of these units and the congressional committees that provide, or more recently, fail to provide, a reasonable level of funding for shared instrumentation programs, may need to be reminded of what is truly meant by the term "core facility."
Ken Williams W.M. Keck Foundation Biotechnology
Resource Laboratory at Yale University
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