Research Resources

Individual faculty laboratories are located in Engel Hall and in the adjacent Fralin Biotechnology Center. A stockroom in Engel Hall provides routine supplies and reagents at reasonable cost for biochemical and molecular biology research. In addition to equipment in individual labs, centralized research facilities and specialized equipment in the department include:

Keck Confocal Microscope Facility: The Confocal Microscope Facility, located in the Fralin Biotechnology Center, has a state-of-the-art Zeiss LSM510 confocal microscope. The facility is available for use by Virginia Tech faculty, students, and staff on a fee basis. For additional information on this facility, contact the facility manager at decourcy@vt.edu or (540) 231-7959.

Keck Transgenic Plant Greenhouse: The Keck Transgenic Plant Greenhouse is a 3500 sq. ft. greenhouse dedicated to the growth of transgenic plants. As such, it supports research by faculty in several departments that need state-of-the-art greenhouse space.

Fralin Fermentation and Protein Purification Facility. The Fralin fermentation facility contains equipment to grow large quantities of plants, microbes or animal cells under controlled conditions. The facility includes centrifuges and spectrophotometer donated by the Beckman Corporation. For additional information and use of this facility, contact the faculty supervisor and center director at deandr@vt.edu or (540) 231-5895.

Department of Chemistry Research Facilities include a stockroom that provides routine reagents and supplies at reasonable cost, an NMR laboratory with a Bruker MSL 200/300 for multinuclear studies of solids at nominal field strengths of 200/300 MHz (protons) and Varian Inova 400 and JEOL Eclipse 500 spectrometers for high resolution proton, carbon, and multinuclear NMR solution studies. Both instruments are equipped with field gradient probes for efficient 2D-NMR spectroscopy. The NSF Polymer Science and Technology Center maintains a Varian Unity 400 MHz spectrometer for high-resolution solution NMR studies. The Department of Chemistry, in collaboration with the Department of Geological Sciences, also maintains single-crystal X-ray diffractometers interfaced with a number of personal computers and PC-based structure determination software in a centralized Crystallography Laboratory which is available for use by members of the VT community on a fee basis. The Department of Geological Sciences houses a Vibrational Spectroscopy Lab with an ISA Jobin-Yvon 1 meter U-1000 Raman microprobe with a PMT detector, a Dilor XY 0.64 meter Raman microprobe and accessory spectrometer with CCD multichannel detector, and a Nicolet 740 FTIR microprobe with Spectra-Tech microscope. A Joule-Thompson cooling stage that operates to -180 Celsius, a pressurized gas cell, and a heating stage are available for use on any of the microprobes. For additional information on the Vibrational Spectroscopy Lab, contact the faculty supervisor at (540) 231-7455.

A Flow Cytometry Core Facility is available for use on a fee basis by all VT faculty, staff, and students at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. Two instruments, a Coulter Altra Cell Sorter with UV Laser capabilities, and a Coulter EPICS-XL are housed in the facility. Training on the EPICS-XL can be provided for individuals who prefer to run their own samples. For additional information, contact the facility supervisor at jkalnits@vt.edu or (540) 231-4115.

Additional centralized facilities on campus include:

The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute Core Laboratory Facility offers the following services on a cost-recovery basis: nucleic acid extraction, DNA sequencing and fragment analysis, real-time quantitative PCR, screening and analysis of commercial and custom microarrays, one and two dimensional gel analysis, spot-picking, robotic handling of the digestion and cleanup steps in protein processing, and mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF and LC-MS/MS) analysis components. Genomic and proteomic analyses are fully supported by computational and bioinformatics programs.

The New Media Center at Virginia Tech and the Agriculture, Human and Natural Resources Information Technology programs provide to the VT community training and consulting services for a wide variety of computer software packages, support for the reproduction and use of digital images and files, support for graduate students in creating an electronic thesis/dissertation, and consulting for web development and desktop publishing.

Library Resources A library focused on biochemical literature is located in Engel Hall and is open 24 hr a day to all Biochemistry department members. The Carol M. Newman Library houses the principal collections of the university and provides access to online searches of the collections, electronic access to scholarly journals, and electronic access to databases for a wide variety of disciplines. The Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine library houses a large array of specialized collections and current journals related to biomedical and clinical research interests.

The VT CAVE is a multi-person, room-sized, high-resolution, 3D video and audio environment that can be used to visualize a variety of objects and structures including a wide variety of biological molecules in 3D space. The facility is available for use by VT faculty, staff, and students.