Molecular Core Facilities

The Biology Department has made a major commitment to maintain state-of-the-art equipment for molecular and cellular research. In addition to individual laboratory facilities for teaching and research, there are dedicated rooms for instrumentation and cell culture. The main cell culture facility houses two 6-foot and three 4-foot laminar flow hoods along with four CO2 incubators and three inverted phase microscopes. An additional culture room is available for infectious, and biologically hazardous material experiments. The main instrumentation room houses three Hewlett Packard diode array UV/VIS spectrophotometers, two HPLCs (LKB and Hewlett Packard), a Molecular Dynamics scanning laser densitometer, BRL electroporation apparatus, microplate reader, and a thermal cycler for PCR. Two additional Beckman DU UV/VIS spectrophotometers are in an adjacent teaching lab. Other rooms contain: Beckman LS1800 Liquid Scintillation counter, Wallac 1470 gamma counter, and two hybridization ovens for isotope work; two Beckman ultracentrifuges and a Sorval high speed centrifuge; ultracold freezers and cryogenic storage; lyophilization, and gel and sample drying capabilities; electrophoretic gel documentation; and, autoradiographic processing. Agarose, PAGE, transblotting, and sequencing electrophoresis are carried out in the individual undergraduate research laboratories. In addition to the above instrumentation, many of the teaching labs contain Beckman high speed centrifuges, and have various microscopic capabilities (light, video, fluorescent, phase).