The LCBR spans approximately 3,500 sq ft, divided into four areas: sample receipt and handling, general biomarker lab, DNA prep and analysis lab, a CLIA-certified clinical chemistry lab. It also houses a 160 sq ft cold room, as well as office, conference, and workstation spaces.
Biorepository
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The facility has three separate power lines (ensuring that complete loss of power is exceedingly rare) and full generator backup. Freezer inspection, maintenance, and cleaning is performed frequently.
Monitoring schedule:
- Daily: temperature and status of freezers and LN2 storage units, visual inspection.
- Monthly: alarm testing, backup generator testing.
- Quarterly: preventive maintenance; Semiannually: HVAC system maintenance.
- All monitoring is documented, as is each occasion on which a sample is placed in or removed from a freezer or storage unit. For alarm monitoring, an autodialer (Sensaphone model 1108) is connected to all freezers and storage units to monitor unit temperature, power failure, and ambient temperature. The first number dialed is that of a beeper that is monitored by on-call staff 24/7. We have a certified freezer repair service on call 24/7. Access to the repository is limited, and it is equipped with intrusion alarms.
Equipment
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- Stago Evolution Automated Coagulation analyzer for coagulation and immunoturbidmetric assays.
- Meso Scale Discovery Multi-Array System for electrochemliminescence detection of biomarkers in singleplex and multiplex formats.
- Dade Behring BNII Nephelometer
- BioTek Elx808 Ultra Microplate Reader for fluorescence and absorbance ELISA and Kinetic assays.
- Bio-Rad BioPlex Protein Array Systems for fluorescent bead-based Luminex technology to simultaneously analyze up to 100 targets in a single microplate well.
- Perkin Elmer Wizard2 gamma counter for RIA.
- Roche e411 for specialized chemistries using electrochemiluminescence technology.
- Roche Cobas Integra 400 Plus for general chemistries.
- Beckman Coulter LH 500 cell counter
- Tosoh G8 hematology analyzer
- Miltenyi MACS Quant Analyzer 10 Flow Cytometer to facilitate rapid and simple cellular analysis.
- Thermo Scientifice NanoDrop spectrophotometer for quantification of DNA.
- Polarstar Optima filter-based multidetection microplate reader offering 5 detection modes including chemiluminescence and simultaneous dual emission detection used for quantification of DNA by pico green method.
- MJ Research Programmable thermocyclers (4) for PCR.
- Electrophoresis apparatuses for RFLP and protein analyses.
- ABI Prism 7900 DNA Sequence Detector for TaqMan-based SNP analysis.