MAJOR EQUIPMENT List most important equipment items already available standard major equipment conduct biomedical
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| FACILITIES: Specify the facilities to be used for the conduct of the proposed research. Indicate the performance sites and describe capacities, pertinent capabilities, relative proximity, and extent of availability to the project. Under “Other,” identify support services such as machine shop, electronics shop, and specify the extent to which they will be available to the project. Use continuation pages if necessary. | |
| Laboratory:
At Virginia Tech, the resources (laboratory, animal, computer, office, and other) of a veterinary college, two other colleges and five departments will be described on the continuing pages. See continuation pages and Appendix A: Virginia Tech Facilities). |
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| Clinical:
The Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital of VMRCVM has clinical pathology and histopathology services. These services are run by 4 board-certified clinical pathologists, 4 board-certified pathologists, and trained state-supported technicians. In addition, VMRCVM has a clinical microbiology laboratory, and a full-range of other small and large animal clinical services (see Appendix A: Virginia Tech Facilities). |
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| Animal:
See continuation pages and Appendix A: Virginia Tech Facilities. |
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| Computer:
See continuation pages and Appendix A: Virginia Tech Facilities. |
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| Office:
See continuation pages and Appendix A: Virginia Tech Facilities. |
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| Other:
See continuation pages and Appendix A: Virginia Tech Facilities. |
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| MAJOR EQUIPMENT: List the most important equipment items already available for this project, noting the location and pertinent capabilities of each.
The mentors in this program have complete and unfettered access to the major equipment at VMRCVM, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), and Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM). VMRCVM and these collaborating colleges have all the standard major equipment to conduct bioMedical research studies. More detailed information is included in Appendix A: Virginia Tech Facilities for detailed description of these facilities and other facilities available at Virginia Tech. |
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Laboratory (continuation):
- Lab: VA-MD Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM)
Center for Molecular Medicine & Infectious Disease (CMMID), a college center, is a physically separate facility with five research buildings and multiple animal housing buildings located on 25 acres, and 40,000 sq ft of laboratories for immunology and microbiology with emphasis on host-pathogen interactions, vaccine, and diagnostic points of view. This facility has:
- Two fully-equipped tissue culture rooms.
- Three common laboratories (15,000 sq. ft) with ultracentrifuges, FPLC, HPLC, 3 PCR-units, electrophoresis, Glyco SE 2000 FACE carbohydrate analysis system, 14L fermenter, Kodak Image station, ELISA reader, image cytometer, capillary electrophoresis, beta and gamma counters, spectrophotometers, 2 microphysiometers, electroporation equipment, PCR and real-time PCR machines, protein purification columns, photodyne documentation, 2-D gel electrophoresis, scanning densitometers, ultracentrifuges, a number of computers hooked up to equipment, and electron, confocal, vannox, and fluorescent microscopes.
- Personal laboratory space (40,000 sq. ft.); and
- Centralized dishwashing, sterilization and media preparation
Infectious Diseases Unit adjacent to CMMID has a functional BSL-3 lab (800 sq ft) and adjoining BSL-2 lab (800 sq ft); and ABSL-2/ABSL-3 animal holding space.
Common Support Laboratories in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology and the teaching hospital of the VMRCVM maintain necropsy, histopathology, clinical pathology, clinical microbiology, cell sorter, and statistical analysis laboratories, which are all available to the program director and faculty at VMRCVM.
Morphology Laboratory - The electron microscopy facility at the VMRCVM Blacksburg is equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation for ultrastructural analysis of biological and non-biological Materials and to provide investigators with data concerning specimen morphology and elemental composition. Facilities are available for transmission and scanning electron microscopy, x-ray microanalysis, semi- and ultrathin-sectioning, freeze fracture, light microscopy, computerized morphometric and three-dimensional reconstruction studies of electron micrographs, gross specimen photography, and photographic processing.
VMRCVM at College Park is physically housed in the same building with Maryland Department of Agriculture's animal health diagnostic laboratory and it includes a BSL-3 lab with animal facilities.
- Lab: Animal & Poultry Sciences, College of Agriculture & Life Sciences
Dr Smith in the Department of Animal and Poultry Sciences (APSC) has significant laboratory facilities including about 2500 sq. ft each of laboratory space. In addition, Dr. Smith has access to shared preparatory room space that is available to members of his lab. Housed on the second floor of Litton-Reaves building, this laboratory has a general wet-lab facility, dark room for autoradiography, and cell culture facility. In addition, the labs have equipment for basic genomics activities including an ABI 377 for sequencing, and 2D gel-based proteomics, horizontal gel electrophoresis (12 total) and PCR (9 thermal cyclers) systems. In addition to these, Dr. Smith also has access to an equipment room.
- Lab: Virginia Bioinformatics Institute Core Lab Facility (CLF)
This core laboratory facility provides the facilities that allow for the use of genomics, gene profiling, proteomics, and metabolomics analysis techniques:
- Isolation of genetic Material
- Genomic sequencing
- Primer walking
- Primer design
- Contig design
- Fragment analysis
- Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction
- Software packages available for analysis
- Management, support and maintenance staff available for assistance, lectures, and workshops.
- Genechip and Microarray platforms including labeling, hybridization and scanning.
- Proteomic analysis
- 2-D gel analysis and spot picking
- Robotic handling of digestion and clean-up steps
- MALDI-ToF and LC-MSMS analysis
- Protein interaction instrumentation
Animal (continuation):
- Animal: VA-MD Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM)
VMRCVM at Virginia Tech has non-client holding facilities to house both small and large animals on a 25 acre site; and two ACLAM board-certified lab animal veterinarians to provide clinical and management support, one with an MPH and the second with an MS in toxicology; GLP study support; and a central vivarium (13,000 gsf) with 15 animal holding rooms, 2 quarantine rooms, surgery suite with gas anesthesia machines, procedures room, necropsy room, cold storage room, and breeding, surgical, anesthesia, and other support provided by trained staff. A portion of these facilities on the Virginia Tech campus will be used to house rats for the uranium toxicity study that will generate data and tissue samples for the R33 Phase II study. Though students in this training program may not be able to use these facilities, due to increased federal regulations, the VMRCVM at Blacksburg has associated BSL-3 animal rooms (10 rooms @ approx. 120-150 sq ft), with HEPA-filtered HVAC system specific to each room, and shower-in/out change areas contained within the IDU and adjoining BSL-2 and BSL-3 labs. This facility is compliant with CDC recommendations from “Biosafety in Microbiological Laboratories”. Materials can be produced in this facility that could be used by students in the VRP. BSL-3 animal facilities are also provided at VMRCVM, College Park.
Computer (continuation):
- Computer: VA-MD Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM)
All faculty in the VMRCVM have the state of art computers, printers, scanning and fax machines in their buildings. In program director’s lab, for data analysis there are 3 Apple G3 Macintosh computers and 2 Laser printers. For flow cytometry and Cytofluor/OD analysis there are WIN 486 and Pionex 486 computers, respectively. Computers have access to internet, Genbank, DNA STAR, GRATEFUL/PUB MED.
- Computer: Animal & Poultry Sciences, College of Agriculture & Life Sciences
Dr. Smith also has workstations that are on the network and has bioinformatics programs including Phred, Phrap, Polyphred and Consed for sequence analysis. Since the workstations are also on the network, they will be available to trainees to learn about sequence analysis.
- Computer: Virginia Bioinformatics Institute Core Computational Facility (CCF)
Supporting VMRCVMs state-of-the-art research activities is this core computational facility with:
A high performance server with no less than 30 GFlop capacity which will reach TeraFlop computation capacity within three years.
A highly configurable Sun Enterprise 15000 database server with an initial storage capability of approximately two Terabytes of data.
A server dedicated to production of high resolution graphics for data visualization.
Remote and local visualization system capabilities.
Gigabit Ethernet as communications backbone with dedicated, scalable, and high speed Internet Connection including potential Internet-2 connection.
Highly skilled systems administrators insuring reliable, professional operation of these computing facilities.
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