This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This award provides funds to convert 10,745 square feet in Portland State University's (PSU) Science Building 2 (SB2) into a Center for Life in Extreme Environments (CLEE). The renovations of Science Building 2 (SB2) at PSU will enable a core group of CLEE researchers to conduct research on the ecological and physiological effects of extremes in temperature and pH and extremes in nutrient, water and oxygen availability that spans all domains of life. Additionally, the space for the animal care facility for aquatic organisms will be doubled to facilitate greater temperature control and range for rearing fish from thermally extreme environments. The plan will provide central laboratory support space, including flexible equipment rooms, walk-in environmental control rooms and rooms dedicated to microscopy, cell culture, growing thermophiles and clean-room research. The linear equipment room will house autoclaves, glass wash facilities, and shared equipment and PSU's thermophile and Oregon's Collection of Methanogens (OCM) culture collections. In addition, the space will permit relocation of the microarray facility in this area. By substantially improving the quality of research space available to CLEE faculty, PSU will continue to lead international efforts to take an integrative approach to investigating life in extreme environments across all three domains of life. The improvements in the research facility will permit research involving a more holistic understanding of the potential human impacts on, and interactions with, species from environmentally sensitive habitats. The doubling of the Aquatic facility with the capacity to rear coldadapted fishes will place PSU as key center for such research. The consolidation of high temperature, high biomass growth facilities will enhance biochemical, molecular and microbial studies of thermostable molecules, thermophiles and their viruses. The renovations will also broadly impact education at PSU. The University has a long history of success in attracting and matriculating non-traditional and older students in an urban setting and it will help expand undergraduate and graduate research programs and will stimulate interdisciplinary research projects between Chemistry, Environmental Science, Biology and Geology and other institutions in the region.
This award provided funds to renovate research laboratories in the Science Building 2 (now SRTC) of Portland State University. The project included the complete renovation of two thirds of the 4th floor, and the expansion of the fishes rearing facility on the 1st floor. The renovations (Center for Life in Extreme Environments, CLEE) transformed very old and poorly designed small labs into a research facility that will help promote research and research training activities in the areas of extremophile biology. The CLEE supports collaborative research between Chemistry, Physics and Biology, and with numerous national and international colleagues. The renovation was completed in July 2011, mostly on or ahead of schedule. Labs were moved in, up and running that August, 2011. The cold-seawater Aquaria were installed in the Aquatic facility in mid August 2011 (see image), and represent one of the few facilities worldwide to raise cold-adapted fishes. In the past year since we have moved into the space all CLEE faculty have been prolific, publishing between 2011 and 2012 over 35 papers in areas of the biology of extreme environments; two were recently accepted in Nature. The space currently supports over 20 undergraduate students doing research and over 25 graduate students working on MSc or PhD research projects. At many levels, the project has been an incredible success. The new space has provided many unprecedented positive outcomes. Not only has it increased interactions amongst faculty and students in Chemistry and Biology (see image); the support space has provided ways in which many different labs from all the Departments in the building gather and meet on an informal basis. In particular, the graduate students have expressed how this new space has transformed their enthusiasm to do research; the bright, efficiently designed space has now stimulated many graduate students to start new collaborations with each other and other labs. The entire building was certified LEED Gold.
