Facilities and Equipment

We have 900 sq. ft. of dedicated laboratory space in WVU's new Life Sciences Building. The laboratory is fully outfitted for basic molecular biology studies. Major pieces of equipment include three BioRAD Icyclers, a Legend RT centrifuge, three microcentrifuges, an 11 cu ft. incubator, a -80 freezer, and all other essential molecular biology instrumentation. In addition, the Biology department has a core genomics facility with an ABI 3130XL capillary sequencer, a BioRad IQ5 Real-Time PCR machine, a Miraibio spectrophotometer, and an AlphaInnotec gel documentation system.

The building also contains ca. 2000 sq ft. of greenhouse space on the roof and ten plant growth chambers. A university forest and several agronomy farms are also available for field experiments. Extensive computational resources are also available, including a cluster of 27 Dell PowerEdge 1550 servers, each with 1 Gb of RAM and 2 1.26 Ghz processors, and a Dell PowerEdge 2550 server as the master node. In addition, we are in the process of purchasing a dedicated 24-processor Beowulf cluster with 3.5 terabytes of storage in a RAID array, and 4 Gb of RAM per processor.