The Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the School of Medicine-Duluth is active in biomedical science research. The department consists of six full-time faculty members and an equal number of faculty who have adjunct or joint appointments. (Please see "Faculty Listing" under their WEB page for a full description of the research interests of their faculty.)
Facilities
The departmental faculty are housed in approximately 8,000 square feet of research, office, and support space. This includes walk-in cold room and tissue culture facilities. The School of Medicine also contains AAALAC accredited animal facilities with individual rooms for environmental control and small animal surgery. Photo, slide, and digital preparative services are available. All offices and research laboratories are equipped with Ethernet connections. UMD has a good collection of biochemical periodicals in the Library and access to the university's full collection via Internet. UMD recently has opened a digital imaging laboratory equipped with the latest computers, multiple OS platforms, and powerful 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 department prides itself on the sharing of researc h equipment and flexibility for multiple users. 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 * Hewlett Packard GC/MS system * Bio-Rad Gel-Doc molecular imaging system * Alpha Innotech FluorChem 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 and fluorometric HPLC detectors * Perkin Elmer thermocyclers * Perkin Elmer peptide synthesizer * Perkin Elmer atomic absorption spectrophotometer with graphite furnace * TEM, SEM, 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
