Dear Colleagues:
  
It is with pleasure that I wish to announce two new additions to the Core Facilities at the Health Science Center.
  
1. The Grand Opening of the Small Animal Imaging Core.
The establishment of this Core Facility was made possible by support from the Brain Institute.  The Core contains a micro CT (Electric EVS-RS9 micro-CT scanner) and a recently purchased Small Animal MRI (Bruker BioSpec 7.1 T horizontal-bore  MRI).  Both instruments have monitoring hardware that allows a wide variety of imaging experiments to be performed on live animals and specimens.  The Core is located in the basement of the E.E. Jones Medical Science Building.

For further information contact
Osama Abdullah, M.S.
A300 (basement level)
E.E. Jones Medical Science Building (EEJMRB)
(801) 587-8357
 oabdullah@cores.utah.edu
 or   
Edward W. Hsu, Ph.D.
Director, Small Animal Imaging Core
Assistant Professor, Bioengineering department
Warnock Engineering Building room 2857
(801) 585-7550
   
 2. The Cell Imaging Core has obtained a Veritas Laser Capture Microdissection Instrument.  This instrument is a gracious gift from ARUP.
 The instrument is capable of microdissecting tissue sections or isolating cells for further analysis (i.e. RT-PCR).  For training and more information, please contact Chris Rodesch, Ph.D.
Director, Cell Imaging Core
(crodesch@cores.utah.edu)
Or go to www.cellimagingcore.org <http://www.cellimagingcore.org/
  downloadable applications and hardware specifications.

In addition, the NIH has just funded a new Confocal Microscope that will be purchased this year.

Thank you,

Jerry Kaplan, Ph.D.
Director, HSC Core Research Facilties

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Our Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics facility recently ranked 1st in a national contest to identify proteins within a complex mixture and 4th in its identification of phosphorylation sites. This competition was held by the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities in January 2007; 120 facilities were sent the same complex mixture of proteins and 44 labs submitted results. Congratulations Chad, Krishna and Mike!

The DNA Sequencing and Genomics Core now offers robotic services for those wishing to automate a variety of lab protocols, from 384-well plate pipetting to DNA and plasmid preps, using the Biomek FX and Velocity 11 Vprep robotic stations.

The Microarray core facility has expanded its services to include Affymetrix and Nimblegen platforms, in addition to the Agilent platform. We thank Bob Weiss for his generosity in sharing his lab's Affymetrix chip reader.

The Cell Imaging core has a new high-throughput confocal imager with liquid handling and environmental controls (Pathway 885 from BD Biosciences; http://www.atto.com/products/pathway/). This instrument will allow users to screen small molecule and RNAi libraries for their effects on cell cycle, cytoplasmic and nuclear translocation and co-localization.