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A survey of 124 protein and/or nucleic acid chemistry facilities has provided a basis for estimating the resources needed to establish a facility, the financial support needed to keep it operating, and the technical capabilities it might reasonably be expected to achieve. Based on these data, an average core facility occupied 870 ft2, was staffed by three full-time personnel, and was equipped with 4-5 major instrument systems. Because user fees generated an average of about $101,000/year in income compared with an average operating budget of about $197,000/year, even a facility that charged user fees would, on average, still require an annual subsidy of about $96,000. Although most government and industrial core facilities did not assess user fees, at least 83 of the 124 respondents did have a preestablished schedule of service charges that enabled a compilation to be made of the average cost of providing a number of typical facility analyses and syntheses. The greater than 100-fold range in charges asses...

A survey of 40 protein and nucleic acid chemistry facilities has provided data about the capabilities of core facilities and the cost of the services they provide. Approximately 43% of the +158,000 average annual operating budget for a typical university facility is derived from service charges. After correcting for the various degrees of subsidization of the different facilities, it was found that it costs a typical university facility +65 to carry out an acid hydrolysis and amino acid analysis on a protein. A 25-residue peptide can be synthesized and cleaved for +2078, whereas sequencing the same peptide costs +874. A 25-residue oligonucleotide can be synthesized for +258. The total work output per month of an average facility corresponds to 65 amino acid analyses, 15 amino acid sequencing runs, three peptide syntheses, and 16 oligonucleotide syntheses. Depending on the approach used, from 85 to nearly 200 pmol of protein are required to obtain an accurate amino acid composition. To sequence the first 1...