Facilities

One chemical fume hood

Freezers: two -20 C and one -80 C

Refrigerators: 2 

Static and orbital shaking incubators

Electroporator: 2

Electrophoresis (gel running) equipment

Microcentrifuges

Gradient PCR thermal cyclers

Spectrophotometer

Qubit Fluorometer: to estimate DNA and RNA concentrations)

Heat blocks

All other minor items or equipment needed to perform the experimental work. 

Dial-A-Wave (DAW) consisting of fast speed rotary motors (NEMA-23 Bipolar 50 mm Stepper Motor) capable of sub-millimeter water pressure steps. 

• The DAW allows precisely controlled signals to be uniformly dispersed among the colonies present on a microfluidic chip. 

• The motors physically adjust the input reservoirs’ height and thereby modulate their hydrostatic pressures. 

• The linear actuators are controlled with custom Java software, and a calibration routine automatically maps their physical positions to input mixing ratios on-chip. 

• The entire system is highly automated and robust, and capable of generating independent dynamic environments with minimal user input.

Our facility includes two OMEGA Series microplate reader from BMG LABTECH. 

This plate reader allows us to measure several fluorescent proteins in living cells. 

The system is capable of measuring fluorescence and time-resolved fluorescence from the bottom or top of a microplate, measuring up to eight fluorescence filter pairs in a single measurement, collecting absorbance spectral measurements with 1 nm resolution in less than 1 s per well, detecting luminescence signal with less than a 0.2 s duration, and accepting optics to detect simultaneous dual emission from two fluorescence or luminescence emission channels in a single measurement event. 

We have filters that allow us to measure GFP, YFP, CFP, and mCherry, and we have four additional filter positions open if other fluorescent measurements are required. 

The plate reader can shake incubating plates and keep them at a constant temperature (up to 65 C). 

We have developed custom python scripts to quickly analyze the large amount of data produced from microplate reader experiments.