Equipment: Helium Recovery Equipment: Securing Rhode Island and Southern New England NMR structural biology infrastructure

An award is made to Brown University to support the acquisition of helium recovery equipment to recycle the helium used by the three nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers in the Structural Biology Core Facility at Brown University. Used by researchers at Brown, in Rhode Island, and across southeastern New England, the NMR spectrometers at Brown University employ extremely high magnetic fields to see the structure, motions, and interactions of proteins and biomolecules involved in essential biological processes with atomic resolution.

The Brown structural biology facility is also an important component of efforts by researchers in the region to make broad and sustained educational impacts, encouraging underserved Rhode Island school students into the STEM pipeline – including classroom teaching, training of students from groups under-represented in science, and collecting data and serving as training platform as part of a sustained interactions with local underserved public schools. These NMR spectrometers use superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium to a few degrees above absolute zero to maintain superconductivity needed for these high magnetic fields.

As a result, helium constantly boils off NMR systems and escapes to the atmosphere. Hence, a constant supply of helium is needed for the maintenance and operation of the instruments. Helium is an expensive and non-renewable resource, so it is fiscally and environmentally responsible to recycle helium.

The global supply of helium is currently in an extreme shortage due to manufacturing and supply chain conditions. The liquid helium recycling systems acquired with support from this award will capture and re-liquefy the helium released from NMR spectrometers and offer high efficiency recovery of all helium used for NMR operation.

The project enables acquisition of the helium liquification and collection equipment necessary for recycling approximately 2200 liters of liquid helium per year for three magnet systems. The 850 MHz NMR (highest magnetic field in Rhode Island and second highest in New England) requires refills every few weeks – hence the facility is severely endangered by short-term supply outages.

This project stabilizes helium supply, providing the important added benefit of lengthening time between 850 MHz system fills, enabling more usage time per year. The work enabled by the spectrometers served by these helium recovery efforts provides atomic-level insight into 1) the function of essential glutamine-rich domains of nucleic-acid interacting proteins across all eukaryotes and the mechanisms that regulate their interactions, 2) allosteric signaling in Cas9 to yield first-of-its-kind insight into DNA editing to further improve laboratory science and precision medicine, 3) peptide-protein interaction kinetics to modulate and study cellular networks, among other projects.

Helium recycling ensures the ability to continue these efforts, the first steps in long-term objectives to map mechanistic links between biological sequence, structure and function.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.