Core Laboratory Facility:

The CBMG Core Laboratory Facility provides faculty and students with a centralized, shared resource where multiple users have the opportunity to access sophisticated instrumentation whose initial cost and continued maintenance fees would likely exceed the budgets of individual investigators. The college provides support staffing for the facility and maintenance costs are subsidized by CBMG, the Biology department and by the college, thus allowing faculty and students cost-effective access to state-of-the-art equipment. The minimal fees charged to users help the departments and the college cover the cost of service contracts on the instruments, as well any consumables and/or materials needed to maintain the machines.

The facility is accessible 24 hours a day and a staff member is available during normal working hours to train new users, provide technical support and ensure the instrumentation is kept in optimal condition. Located in room 0107 of the Microbiology building, the facility includes the Visual Imaging Center, the DNA Sequencing Facility and additional shared equipment.

• The Visual Imaging Center provides researchers with the opportunity to observe and image live, fixed, unlabeled or fluorescently labeled samples using one of several available microscopes, including a Zeiss LSM 510 confocal microscope, a DeltaVision deconvolution/image restoration microscope, an Olympus fluorescent microscope and a Leica dissecting microscope.
• Located within the Sequencing Facility is an Applied Biosystems 3730xl DNA Analyzer, whose 96-capillary array allows researchers to perform high-throughput, large-scale nucleic acid sequencing and analysis. An additional Applied Biosystems 3100 Genetic Analyzer offers further resources for users who are working on smaller-scale sequencing and fragment analysis applications. A Roche LightCycler 480 Real-Time PCR machine is also located within the facility.
• Additional equipment includes a Mini-Medical film processor and darkroom, a BioRad Molecular Imager FX Pro Plus, an Eppendorf MasterCycler and a BioRad Protean IEF Electrophoresis System.

Contact Information:

Amy Beaven
Manager
Core Laboratory Facility
0107 Microbiology Building
University of Maryland
abeaven@umd.edu
301-405-7238