“We have all this incredible technology under one roof which has been historically separated from each other,” said Uri Manor, assistant professor at the Biological Sciences School and faculty director for Sandbox technology. “As a rule, you will have chemists in a building with their equipment and their biologists in another building with their equipment … The idea of a well -named sandbox, is to bring together all these” toys “so that these scientists can” play “together.”
Two highly specialized characteristics of technological sandbox are cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and cryo-electron tomography (cryo-and). Over the past decade, these methods have become the most powerful tools in the world to analyze the fundamental properties of life with unprecedented precision. More advanced than traditional imaging methods, cryo-EM and cryo-and samples are cooled in a process that occurs so quickly that molecules are “frozen” in place to provide rich details of interactions and life functions.
Technology sandbox also includes a suite for mass spectrometry, an analytical tool that reveals the chemical composition of substances. Researchers use mass spectrometry tools, as well as other technologies, such as cryo-EM, to better understand protein structures with increasingly lively details.