Center for Nursing Research
Biological Laboratory Services

The state of the art Center for Nursing Research Biological Sciences Laboratory has 3,300 square feet of space. The laboratory was designed using an open concept, with portable lab workbenches that allow flexibility in faculty and student research needs. The lab includes a tissue culture room, housing modular stacked CO2 incubator units used to cultivate cell cultures derived from a variety of tissue sources and laminar flow biological safety cabinets for the performance of sterile applications and techniques.

A Millipore Milli-Q Synthesis water purification system provides high quality ultra pure water for all applications and is fed with purified water from a Millipore RiOs 16 reverse osmosis water purification system with a 100-Liter reservoir tank. The reverse osmosis water purification system also supplies water to the steam sterilizer and glassware washer housed in the glassware wash room. The laboratory has two individual rooms with chemical fume hoods for chemical use and radioisotope use; an available dark room; and a common equipment corridor housing analytical equipment used in biological and clinical research. A REES Alarm Monitoring System monitors critical equipment (i.e., the ultra low freezers and liquid nitrogen storage containers).

In addition to standard laboratory equipment and supplies, the laboratory has a refrigerated Sorvall centrifuge for use in the separation and sedimentation of cellular material and suspended particles, a Perkin Elmer Victor 3 V Multilabel Plate Reader for use in immunoassays, as well as other laboratory assays, a Perkin Elmer PlateWash Plus system for plate washing of 96- and 384-well microplates, and a Mettler-Toledo analytical balance for the precise measurement of chemicals for the preparation of solutions and/or for cell weight comparisons. Four liquid nitrogen cryosystem freezers are used for long-term storage of genetic samples. There are also five ultra low - 80° C Freezers that are used for storage of biological and clinical samples, and a 5° C refrigerator / - 20° C freezer combination unit for the storage of reagents and laboratory samples.