Cell culture: A secure Cell Culture laboratory was established in 2007 in the Chemistry Research building by Professor M. R. Nichols and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. This facility is solely for cell culture use and houses 3 Nuaire laminar flow hoods, a refrigerator/freezer, a manual defrost freezer, four water-jacketed CO2 incubators, a liquid N2 cryosystem for box storage of frozen cell lines, a swinging bucket centrifuge, and two inverted microscopes (one is an Olympus CKX41 with an attached digital camera). The facility is outfitted with all necessary items for cell culture, including sterile disposable pipets and filter units, hemocytometers, water baths, power pipettors, etc. A Nexcelom Cellometer Vision Trio brightfield cell profiling system is available for automated cell counting. Dr. Nichols supervises the cell culture facility and oversees its operation and maintenance.
A laboratory of 330 square feet in the Research Wing houses additional instrumentation, including a Jasco J-1500 circular dichroism (CD) spectropolarimeter outfitted with an SFS-492T Peltier thermostatted stopped-flow accessory and a Perkin-Elmer Victor 3 multi-mode absorbance/fluorescence plate reader (with computer). The J-1500 CD instrument also has fluorescence and absorbance capabilities and is run by a dedicated computer system wired to the network for data saving and management. Additional shared equipment includes a BioRad ChemiDoc MP gel imaging system, BioRad CFX96 quantitative real-time PCR instrument with a C1000 thermal cycler, more plate readers, various models of floor and tabletop centrifuges, and a scintillation counter housed and available in either the Biology department which shares the complex with Chemistry & Biochemistry.