PSF general information and operating guidelines

The aim of PSF is to provide protein production, 3D structure determination and biophysical characterization services to all researchers. We offer onsite access to instrumentation for high throughput crystallography and biophysical characterization acting as stepping-stone environment to large-scale infrastructures such as MAX IV and DIAMOND. We are engaged in PReSTO, the integrated structural biology software project at the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS),

How to become a user

After an initial contact we arrange a meeting to discuss the details and timing of a project. For the national services an application form is then to be filled in. We try to accommodate requests as soon as possible and generally we can start to work on a project within a few days after agreement.

User fees and billing

The user fees for Swedish academics are based on cost for consumables, instruments, university OH, and part of the cost for staff and rent. Commercial users pay full costs including staff, premises and an added margin. Examples of Swedish academic user fees are listed below, for other services please contact us:

user training fees
User training charges Academic Price per Item
Phoenix, Mosquito and RockMaker/Imager/Web 3 000 kr per person and event
Tecan and more RockMaker 3 000 kr per person and event
ITC-200 2 000 kr per person and event
Biacore 2000 2 000 kr per person and event
service fees
Service charges Academic Price per Item Description and material returned to customer
Escherichia coli 1.5 l culture 1 050 kr 1.5 liter culture Overnight culture including induction and harvesting => Frozen pellet of cells
Protein 2-step purification 4 200 kr 2-step purification IMAC-SEC on ÄKTA Xpress, SDS PAGE, concentration, aliquotation, liquid nitrogen flash freeze => Purified protein and PDF documentation
Tag removal (TEV cleavage) plus re-purification 3 600 kr protein batch TEV cleavage, SDS PAGE, IMAC, SDS PAGE, MS, concentration => Purified protein and PDF documentation
self service fees
Self-service charges Academic Price per Item Items included
Phoenix, Mosquito, Imaging 650 kr per plate Mosquito Tips, Strip & BarCode, Plate, ClearSeal, Tape, Screen, Additive HT & imaging
Swiss-LCP 750 kr per plate Mosquito Tips, BarCode, Screen, Swiss-LCP plate, 96 clear TTP plate & imaging
BAG services 300 kr per person and month Remote data collection setup, beamtime admin, pucks, vials, dewars, freezing equipment etc
ITC-200 300 kr per hour none
CD 300 kr per hour Nitrogen gas
BioRad CFX (Thermofluor) 300 kr per hour sypro-orange, plates, seal film and plastics
Stargazer (thermal aggregation) 400 kr per hour plates and plastics
Biacore 2000 300 kr per hour plastic vials, reagents

All experimental work is included in the invoices for protein production services. Projects/samples that fail during technically successful experiments are transferred back to the user together with generated data. Additional investigation or problem solving is performed after discussion and agreement with the user.

Instrument access is granted on fulfilling the user training and charged by user recording actual instrument use in log-books. Recurring failures to do so will result in a penalty fee and instrument access being revoked.

Invoice specifications are emailed to the user/PI quarterly and followed by an invoice sent by KI’s central economy service.

How to acknowledge PSF

To support PSF in future evaluations and applications all users are required to acknowledge experimentation or services performed at PSF in manuscripts submitted for publication. 

Examples:

  • Part of this work was facilitated by the Protein Science Facility at Karolinska Institutet/SciLifeLab  (http://ki.se/psf)  

  • Part of this work was performed at the Karolinska Institutet/SciLifeLab Protein Science Core Facility (http://ki.se/psf)

MM
Content reviewer:
Martin Moche
14-06-2023