This award provides funds to the Department of Horticulture and Forestry at North Dakota State University to give biotechnology students and other life science majors a broader training in cell culture techniques and research. Currently, two plant cell culture and one animal cell culture laboratory courses are available on campus. These courses presently are taught in three different research laboratories. Course content is limited by the available space and range of equipment in each laboratory. The equipment purchased through this award will permit: 1) centralization of the cell culture teaching and research effort; and 2) a broadening of the scope of the courses. The three courses are taught separately during the academic year allowing the equipment to be shared among the courses in one common laboratory. The course content will be enhanced by the inclusion of the following experiments; protoplast isolation and fusion, microinjection/transformation, artificial seed production, hybridoma production with mouse cells, and a cytotoxicity assay using microtiter systems. In the next five years, an estimated 300 students will benefit from the course improvements. The equipment will allow students in biotechnology and students in other plant and animal science majors to be better prepared for graduate education and research careers. The grantee is matching this award with non-Federal sources.
