The Molecular biology program being part of the Chemistry and Biology departments makes use of its own resources and shared resources, which are housed in 3 different buildings: Seaver North, Richard Seaver Biology and Seaver South.
Equipment and facilities for molecular biology students and faculty are readily available and reside in the Molecular Biology laboratory or in common equipment rooms in the Chemistry and Biology buildings. The buildings are next to each other and physically connected by bridges on the second floor, with great accessibility to the Molecular Biology faculty and students. Some of the common facilities and resources available are:
- Cold room
- Sterile room with a laminar flow
- Dark room
- Autoclave
- Milli-Q water system
- Ice machine
- Dry ice
- Liquid nitrogen
- Common equipment rooms with -80ËšC freezers
- Floor centrifuges (Beckman or Sorvals)
- Ultracentrifuge
- Shaker/incubator
Major Equipment
- Cell Sorter Guava EasyCyte Mini System
- GenePix 4000B Microarray Scanner (Axon, Inc)
- Microplate reader with capacity to detect fluorescence
- Pulse field gel electrophoresis system CHEF-DR III.
- Sonicator
- Nanodrop (spectrophotomer) and other UV-Vis spectrophotometers.
Imaging systems (gel documentation, chemiluminescence, fluorescence, phosphoimagers)
- Kodak IC440 imager (cooled CCD camera) (gel documentation, chemiluminescence, SYBR green)
- Carestream Image Station 4000R (gel documentation, chemiluminescence)
- ImageQuant LAS500 (chemiluminiscence, gel documentation, Eth Bromide, SYBR green)
- Storm 860 scanner (phosphoimager, fluorescence with 2 lasers),
- Typhoon trio scanner (phosphoimager, fluorescence, with 3 lasers: Red-,green-, and blue wavelengths)
Real Time PCR systems
- ABI Prism 7000 Sequence Detection System for real time PCR,
- CFX96 Real Time PCR detection system
Microscopes
- Nikon fluorescent microscope with digital camera connected to a computer with image analysis software, remote capture and Z stacking capability,
- Nikon C1-si laser scanning confocal microscope, with MetaMorph image analysis software, two Zeiss and two Nikon fluorescent microscopes with cameras and image analysis software.
Molecular Biology Teaching Laboratory
The Teaching lab consists of 1200 square feet classroom located in the Seaver South Biology building that was recently renovated in 2010.
The Teaching laboratory includes a fume hood, 4 working benches each include 4 knee wholes. Each bench has outlets for gas, compressed air, vacuum, several electrical outlets, and emergency electrical outlets (in the event of a blackout, generators specific for the Chemistry and Biology buildings maintain the essential equipment running). The lab is equipped with:
- PCR machines (3) (two with capabilities to run gradient PCR)
- Vortexers, and multivortexer
- Eppendorf thermomixers (2)
- Microcentrifuges (4), 3 refrigerated
- Table top refrigerated centrifuges (2) with rotors for 15 and 50 ml conical tubes and microplates
- Water baths with and without shaking capabilities
- Freezer, Refrigerator
- Vacuum Concentrator (Speedvac)
- Hybridization oven
- Stratalinker for UV crosslinking
- Power supplies for gel electrophoresis
- Electrophoresis chambers for DNA and protein gels (horizontal and vertical)
- Trans-blot Turbo and Iblot
- 37ËšC incubator w/ rotating wheel
- 30ËšC incubator (2) one w/ rotating wheel
- Personal minifuges (2)
- Nutator, rocking platforms, orbital shaker
Computers
In the teaching lab there are a couple of computers available for student use and to process images from the gel imagers. All computers are connected to the Â鶹ӰÊÓ servers with access to the internet and to several networked printers and copier for shared use. The Biology department has a computer lab with 22 iMacs and the Chemistry department another computer lab with 10 PC computers that are available for our students to use at all times. Specialized Software available for students and faculty:
- Image Quant TL: General image analysis software. Several licenses of Image Quant TL software are available for analysis of images from Typhoon, Storm or LAS500 imager
- DNASTAR Lasergene: DNA, RNA and protein sequence analysis software
- Carestream MI
- DNA Strider