This award is for the acquisition of an integrated liquid-handling robot/multi-well plate reader and a mass spectrometer. These instruments will be available to trained users nearly 24 hours per day and will facilitate integration of multiple research programs across the chemical and life sciences, for researchers ranging from undergraduate students to senior investigators. The instruments will be located in the university's High Throughput Screening Facility, which also houses more than 160,000 chemical compounds. This combination of new instruments and chemical compounds will allow researchers to screen for small molecule perturbers of any biological system they are studying.
Undergraduates from this university and surrounding institutions will both contribute compounds and use the instrumentation in the High Throughput Screening Facility. Visiting minority students, both graduate and undergraduates, who spend summers working in major users' labs, will also use the instruments. In addition, "Chemical Biology" will soon be an undergraduate major at the university and will use these instruments.
