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Facilities and Equipment

processing blood samples

The Biomarker Research Laboratory occupies approximately 1880 ft2 laboratory space in the NM building, 8th floor, on the UTSW North Campus. This space includes a wet laboratory area for sample processing and a biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) tissue culture room, as well as a storage area for ultra-low (-80°C) freezers (-20°C), refrigerators (4°C), and liquid nitrogen tanks.

Laboratory Instruments

Laboratory is well equipped with instruments for clinical samples processing and storage including:

  • Thermo Scientific NanoDrop One microvolume UV-Vis spectrophotometer
  • Countess™ 3 FL automated cell counter
  • Olympus CX43 and Nikon Eclipse Ts2 fluorescence microscope
  • Keyence all in one fluorescence microscope BZ-X710
  • PHCBI CO2 cell culture incubators
  • Biological safety cabinets
  • Refrigerated microcentrifuge
  • Tabletop low-speed centrifuge
  • Refrigerators
  • Freezers
  • Ultra-low freezers (24/7 temperature monitoring)
  • Liquid nitrogen tanks etc.

Shared Equipment

The BRL shares Simmons Cancer Center Core Facility-provided equipment which includes one ultracentrifuge and several low-speed centrifuges. Other commonly used instruments:

  • One scintillation counter
  • Three transilluminators for electrophoretic gel work
  • A Molecular Dynamics phosphorimager
  • One Hewlett Packard spectrophotometer and a LI-COR Biosciences Odyssey Western blot imager

Core Area Equipment

  • Several gyrator hybridization water baths
  • Two Perkin-Elmer PCR machines
  • One MJ-Research RT-PCR gradient machine
  • One luminometer for luciferase assays
  • UTSW – SPH-Data Sciences in Precision
  • One BL960-MAC Molecular Dynamics microtiter plate reader
  • Seven tissue culture hoods (located in four separate rooms)
  • Three chemical hoods
  • One Leica tissue culture inverted microscope
  • One Leica fluorescent (UV) microscope
  • One Perkin-Elmer fluorescence microtiter plate reader
  • Two dissecting microscopes
  • Nine Forma double-chambered CO2 tissue culture incubators
  • Various-sized water baths held at different temperatures
  • Several freezer-refrigerators
  • Various electrophoretic power supplies
  • Agarose gel boxes
  • Other small items needed for this work

Other

Other shared facilities within the department include:

  • Rooms for media preparation
  • Glassware wash-up and sterilization
  • Current journal library within UTSW
  • Online subscriptions to various cancer-related journals
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