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Research Facilities
During
the last several years, we have upgraded the research
facilities throughout the department and college. We have
created several state-of the-art shared instrumentation
laboratories that enable our students and faculty to have
access to sophisticated instruments whose purchase and
maintenance costs far exceed the budgets of individual
investigators. Two of these shared instrument laboratories
center around biological imaging, for both electron and
light microscopy, including brand-new a field-emission
scanner, a new confocal microscope and an image
reconstruction/deconvolution microscope. A newly established
shared laboratory augments existing sequencing facilities on
campus and serves the molecular geneticists for the
large-scale processing and sequencing of nucleic acids, with
multiple robotic sequenators and real time PCR.
Other
core facilities in the department and elsewhere on campus
provide instrumentation for fluorescence-activated cell
sorting (FACS) and analysis, NMR, and mass spectrometry.
Equipment and analytical instruments are available in both
faculty and core laboratories for the maintenance of animal
and plant tissue cultures, for the production of monoclonal
antibodies, for the synthesis and micro-analysis of
proteins, for large-scale fermentation and cultivation of
microorganisms, and for computer assisted molecular
modeling. Support staffing in shared instrumentation
facilities is provided by the college, and maintenance costs
have been subsidized by the college, thereby providing even
occasional users with appropriate training and access, and
simultaneously, keeping instrument use costs low. We have
found that this strategy provides exceptional opportunities
for research and training, and enables our students to
perform experiments with instrumentation that is at the
leading edge of technology. |
