Facilities

The School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences houses hands-on and experiential learning spaces including the Math Zone.

State of the Art Facilities and Equipment 

Electrochemistry Facilities (Dr. Miao)

The Miao lab has the following major equipment:

• a CH 660A electrochemical analyzer
• a CH 900B scanning electrochemical microscope
• a PAR 175 universal programmer
• a PAR 173 potentiostat/galvanostat coupled with a computer-controlled LabVIEW data acquisition card
• a BAS LC-3 amperometric detector
• 2 BAS CV-1B potentiostats
• an IBM EC/225 voltammetric analyzer
• a rotating electrode system
• a quartz crystal microbalance apparatus (shared)
• a home-made electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL) instrument which consists of a Hamamatsu R928 photomultiplier tube
• a Brandenburg model 472R photomultiplier power supply
• a Keithley 6514 system electrometer
• a Nikon TE2000-S inverted microscope coupled with a fluorescence detection system and a Roper Digital CCD camera (installed in a dark room)
• a Fisher Micro-master microscope
• a modified Spex Fluorolog-2 fluorimeter which can be used to measure the spectra generated either from fluorescence or ECL (installed in a dark room, the detector PMT can be run at ~ -30 °C)
• a TD-20/20 luminometer
• a Tektronix CFG253 3MHz function generator
• In addition, the Holder lab has an Epsilon electrochemical work station.

Biochemistry Research Laboratory

Major equipment items include:

• 3 ultra-low (-70oC) freezers
• an RO water purification system
• a liquid scintillation counter
• three cold cabinets
• several UV/Vis spectrophotometers
• two fluorometers including a PTI FRET master I
• two microtiter plate readers
• 3 refrigerated high speed centrifuges
• 2 Beckman L8 ultracentrifuges with a full complement of rotors
• a Beckman Optimax tabletop ultracentrifuge, several microfuges
• two Savant Speedvac concentrators
• pH meters
• balances
• water baths
• a lyophilizer
• a number of gel electrophoresis devices for protein and nucleic acid separations
• a BioRad 2-D electrophoresis unit
• an isoelectric focusing cell
• a French Pressure cell
• two sonicators
• a BioRad liquid chromatography Econosystem, Biologic and DuoFlow FPLC systems
• various other column chromatography equipment
• two CO2 incubators
• temperature controlled floor shakers and incubators
• gas mixers
• two controlled atmosphere chambers
• four fermentors with pH and dissolved oxygen control
• a photo-bioreactor
• a Millipore large-scale cell concentrator
• three temperature cyclers
• three hybridization ovens
• a phosphorimager
• an Olympus BX60 fluorescence microscope equipped with an Optronics DEI-470 color CCD camera and Diaswin image analysis work station
• an Alpha Innotech image analysis and acquisition system
• a BioRad Versadoc imaging system
• an Applied Photophysics SX18MV stopped flow spectrometer
• a Malvern Instruments Nano-zeta dynamic light scattering system
• a Reichard Instruments SR7000PC surface plasmon resonance spectrometer

Common Use Departmental Equipment

Mass Spectrometry:

The departmental mass spectroscopy facility has a new Bruker Microflex MALDI-ToF equipped with PSD capabilities for peptide sequencing and a software suite consisting of Flex Control, Flex Analysis, BioTools, and Polytools. The software suite is capable of performing a MASCOT search to identify proteins from MALDI-ToF data. Polytools allows for the analysis of synthetic polymers using MALDI-TOF data.

There is also a new Thermo Finnigan LXQ ion trap instrument equipped with an Accela HPLC and autosampler. The LXQ is capable of MSN data acquisition using the Xcalibur software suite. The software suite on the LXQ comes complete with BioWorks and Mass Frontier, which allow for protein identification and the deconvolution of complex spectra.

 

Other Spectroscopy Equipment:

Adjacent to the mass spectroscopy core is a new Thermo Fisher UV-Vis spectrophotometer, Thermo Nicolet FT-IR, and a new PTI FRET Master II spectrofluorometer. (Additional UV/Visible spectrophotometers, a polarimeter, and multiple HPLC setups can be found in the research labs.)

Nearby is a workhorse Varian 300 MHz multi-nuclear NMR and the department has shared ownership of the 500 MHz NMR housed in the Polymer Science Research Center.

Newly installed instrumentation includes a Bruker 400 MHz NMR and a Bruker X-band EPR as well as a Jasco J-815 Spectropolarimeter (CD and ABS measurement modes).

Shared facilities:

A facility with two large autoclaves and a lab capacity dishwasher is shared with the Department of Biological Sciences.

Also available in that department are:

• a large scale RO water purification system
• a Packard Tricarb liquid scintillation counter
• two UV/Vis spectrophotometers
• four refrigerated high speed and two Sorvall Supraspeed centrifuges with full complements of rotors
• a Hitachi F-2000 fluorometer
• an Amersham Typhoon 9400 phosphorimager
• a Zeiss LSM 510 confocal microscope.

Equipment in the School of Polymers and High Performance Materials.

Available are:

• an environmental scanning electron microscope with NORAN Vantage x-ray detector
• Norvar crystal (lower detection limit–Be)
• Zeiss 9-2 transmission electron microscope
• AMR 1000A scanning electron microscope with X-ray microprobe
• Nikon optical polarizing microscopes with video and hot stage equipment
• Digital Instruments Nanoscope IIIA Dimension 3000 atomic force microscope with Tektronixs Phaser 560
• Siemens XPD-700 area detector system
• single reflection-absorption (Pike Tech.)
• two real-time FT-IR (Nicolet IR/42 and Bio-Rad FTS 25 FTIR)
• a photoacoustic step-scan FT-IR (MTECH) 
• UV and Fluorescence Spectroscopy Facility includes:
• a Perkin-Elmer Lambda 6 UV/VIS spectrophotometer interfaced to an Epson PC and steady-state and time-resolved fluorescence equipment
• Brice-Phoenix universal photometer
• Brice-Phoenix differential refractometer
• Chromatix KMX-6 low-angle laser photometer with autocorrelator interfaced to an HP-85 computer
• Chromatix KMX-16 laser differential refractometer
• Wyatt Dawn-Flow laser LSI in-line with SEC system
• A Jeol JM2100 transmission electron microscope equipped with cryostage and goniometer and high resolution digital camera cluster was acquired recently.

College and University Support Facilities

The College of Arts and Sciences administers:

• a modern animal facility
• an on-campus scientific supplies storeroom
• an electronics repair shop and a fabrication center

The USM library has a number of databases, including:

• SciFinder Scholar (6 licenses)
• Science Citation Index (ISI web of Sciences)
• Basis BIOSIS (Biological Abstracts, 4 licenses)
• On-line access to all subscribed ACS journals and many ScienceDirect chemistry and biochemistry journals is also available.