Facility Details

The Center for Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics (CBFG) is a 2500 sq. ft. laboratory suite that serves as an undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral and investigator ‘hands-on’ full service training facility in the main biological science building (Pearson Hall) at Miami University. The CBFG is composed of a main wet laboratory, an A/V equipped conference room that seats twenty, a computer room that houses eight high-end workstations. Access to the CBFG is on-demand by users via lock & key after business hours. The CBFG houses four ABI Capillary Electrophoresis Genetic Analyzers (two 310s, a 3130xl, and a 3730) that perform over 20,000 analytical runs per year; an Axon Instruments GenePix4000B (Molecular Devices) microarray scanner; a Beckman BiomekFX liquid handling robot; two real-time Rotor-Gene 3000 thermal cyclers (Corbett Research/Qiagen); a BioRad CFX Connect qPCR system, two NanoDrop spectro­photometers (ND1000, ND2200), a NanoDrop (ND3300) Fluorospectrophotometer; an Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer; seven 96 well gradient capable PCR thermal cyclers, two thermally controlled table top centrifuges capable of accepting 96-well plates used for DNA template preparation; two benchtop micro-centrifuges, Molecular Devices FilterMax F5 microplate reader, an ÄKTA-FPLC with UV detector and fractions collector, a Protea GPR-800 microfluidics protein recovery system, an AlphaInnotechHP Gel Imaging System, BioRad VersaDoc 3000 2D PAGE Imaging System, BioRad Dodeca-cell Criterion PAGE system, several BioRad Mini-Protean Gel Apparatus, BioRad IEF Focusing Cells; numerous power-packs for gel electrophoresis, DNA gel boxes, pipettors, multi-channel pipettors. The CBFG also maintains a Promega HELIX™ on-site Freezer/Cabinet program for molecular biology reagents and kits (Maxwell 16, BiomekFX). Seven computers (Windows 7, WindowsXP, Macintosh iMAC , BioLinux 7 PC, CentOS 6.2 PC), including a workstation that has an AMD Opteron 16 Core Processor with 128GB ECC RAM for genome assembly and bioinformatics analysis. The CBFG maintains paid licenses for CLC Genomics Workbench, CLC Main Workbench, GeneCodes Sequencher. and Biogazelle qBasePLUS, as well as an online subscription to Current Protocols in Bioinformatics. CBFG staff maintain a direct line of communication with users via a LISTSERV; as well as enables trained users to reserve equipment on-line using an electronic calendaring software. The CBFG is also responsible for implementing communications protocols between the CBFG workstations and Miami University’s High Performance Computing facilities (RedHawk Cluster) for effective computation (NCBI Tools, mpiBLAST, IPScans) of large datasets on the multi-node RedHawk Cluster.