Facilities

Bioimaging Centre

Within the School of Biosciences the Bioimaging Centre provides both state of the art instrumentation and experienced staff to assist researchers and students to obtain high quality microscopy. The newly refurbished Centre reopened in 2007 and houses two scanning electron microscopes, a confocal light scanning microscope and a transmission electron microscope.

Mass Spectroscopy

The School of Biosciences has an Agilent 6520 accurate mass QToF MS and an Agilent 6410 triple quadrupole MS (with sensitivity upgrade). These instruments are interfaced to liquid chromatography columns via ESI or APCI sources. The LC systems comprose Agilent 1200 SL binary pumps capable of rapid high resolution chromatography, photodiode array and fluorescence detectors and a novel microfluidic columns (“HPLC chip”) that can be interfaced with either mass spectrometer.

“Next-generation” Sequencing

The School of Biosciences has just installed an Illumina high-throughput Genome Analyzer sequencing system. The GA2 uses a massively parallel sequencing-by-synthesis approach to generate billions of bases of high-quality DNA sequence per run. Current projects involve genome resequencing, small RNA profiling and mRNA-seq.