Research
The Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the Medical School Duluth is very active in conducting research in the biomedical sciences. It has fifteen faculty members, including those having adjunct appointments in BMB with primary appointments in other departments (please see our faculty listings for a full description of the research interests of our faculty).
Facilities
The departmental faculty are housed in approximately 8,000 square feet of research, office, and support space. This includes laboratories, instrument rooms, a walk-in cold room, and tissue culture facilities. The Medical School Duluth also contains AAALAC accredited animal facilities with individual rooms for environmental control and small animal surgery. Offices and research laboratories are equipped with Ethernet connections and wireless networking.
UMD has a collection of biomedical periodicals in the UMD Library and access to the University's full collection via Internet. UMD has a Visualization and Digital Imaging Laboratory equipped with a variety of computers, multiple OS platforms, and plotters. Workstations are loaded with modeling, imaging, and molecular biology software. Each departmental core laboratory is equipped with biochemical instrumentation and specialty equipment specific to the individual projects.
The BMB department prides itself on the sharing of research equipment and flexibility for multiple users, including the Genomics Node. Within the department and school, there is adequate access to a number of shared pieces of research equipment including the following:
- Beckman 6000 series liquid scintillation counters
- Beckman floor and table-top preparative ultracentrifuges with fixed angle, near vertical, and swinging bucket rotors
- Beckman Avanti J25 preparative centrifuges with multiple rotors
- Bio-Rad Gel-Doc molecular imaging system
- Alpha Innotech FluorChem and Kodak digital imaging system for quantitative chemiluminescence and fluorescence analysis
- Roche LightCycler for real-time quantitative gene analysis using PCR
- Hewlett Packard capillary gas chromatograph
- UV, electrochemical, and fluorometric HPLC detectors
- Perkin Elmer thermocyclers
- Perkin Elmer peptide synthesizer
- Perkin Elmer atomic absorption spectrophotometer with graphite furnace and autosampler
- TEM, light, and fluorescent microscopes
- Arcturus PixCell II laser capture microdissection system
- Bio-Rad 2-photon laser scanning confocal microscope at the U.S. EPA
- Eppendorf Microinjection system for nanoliter volume delivery to cells
- Confocal microscope
- 2-dimentional gel electrophoresis
- Nanodrop spectrophotometer
- GenePix microarray scanner
- Computer workstations for affymetrix and bioinformatics software
In addition to local resources, Duluth faculty and graduate students have access to Twin Cities facilities, such as the Center for Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics, the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility, the Division of Structural Biology and Biophysics, the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, the Biomedical Image Processing Lab, the BioMedical Genomics Center, including the DNA Sequencing and Analysis Facility, the Genotyping Facility, the Oligonucleotide and Peptide Synthesis Facility, and the Microarray Facility, the Cancer Center Mouse Genetics Laboratory, and the Advanced Genetic Analysis Center.
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