Facilities

Edwin C. James Medical Research Facility

The basic medical science departments, Anatomy and Cell Biology; Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; Microbiology and Immunology; and Pharmacology, Physiology and Therapeutics, are located in the Edwin C. James Medical Research Facility. Opened in 1994, this $10 million structure provides about 90,000 square feet of laboratory and office space. It is one of four units making up UND’s principal medical education complex.

Karl Christian Wold, MD, Bio-Information Learning Resource Center

Specialized classrooms, auditoriums and the Harley E. French Library of Health Sciences are located in the adjacent Karl Christian Wold, MD, Bio-Information Learning Resource Center. The center contains the Harley E. French Library of the Health Sciences, a dedicated medical library that maintains a diverse collection of print and electronic resources; three (a 260-seat, and two 100-seat) telecommunications auditoriums equipped for interactive television and computer presentations; and numerous study areas and cluster rooms for conference and small-group learning sessions.

Biomedical Research Facility

A 20,000-square-foot, $6 million Biomedical Research Facility designed for state-of-the-art animal care was completed in 2001.

Neuroscience Research Facility

In 2004, a 14,000-square-foot, Neuroscience Research Facility was constructed for $3 million.

The Department

The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is housed on the second floor of the Edwin C. James Research Facility. The department contains laboratory and office space for eight faculty that is arranged around a common area that houses communally shared equipment. The common area also contains a walk-in cold room, a dark room, an autoclave, and a MilliQ water purification system. The department has a spacious conference room that contains the Journal of Biological Chemistry dating back to 1965. A graduate student room provides space outside the laboratory for study, computer work and writing projects. A department lounge is available for use by all department personnel.

Equipment

The department members freely share variety of instruments within their own laboratories and within the core area. Core area items include

• two Avanti J-25 centrifuges
• Beckman LE-80 Ultracentrifuge
• Beckman TL-100 centrifuge
• Beckman J6 centrifuge
• a Bio-RAD Versa Doc Imaging System purchased in 2008
• a Bio-RAD Model GS-670 Imaging Densitomer
• a CCD camera from UVP
• two DU-640 spectophotometers
• two scintillation counters
• a BioTek Epoch microplate spectrophotometer
• Take3 multi-volume plate purchased in 2010

The department has a wide array of instruments for protein purification, chromatography, electrophoresis, blotting applications, PCR, transfection and cell culture. Several -70°C freezers are available.

The mass spectrometry/proteomics facility, located on the third floor of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences is equipped with an Agilent 1100 multidimensional HPLC system, 2D gel electrophoresis system (Bio-Rad), 2D gel digitization system (Versa Doc Imaging System, Bio-Rad) and 2D gel image analysis software (PDQest, Bio-Rad). Located adjacent to the Proteomics laboratory is the Mass Spectrometry Core, which is equipped with two ESI mass spectrometers (API-3000 and QStar, Applied Biosystems-Sciex) and two HPLC systems (UltiMate Capillary/Nano LC System, Dionex, and HP1100, Agilent).

Within the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology is a Basic Sciences Imaging Core Facility, which includes a Hitachi 7500 transmission electron microscope and a Hitachi 4700 field emission scanning electron microscope, a Zeiss LSM 510 META confocal system coupled to a Zeiss Axiophot 200 inverted epifluorescence microscope, an Olympus Fluoview 300 confocal system coupled to an Olympus IX70 inverted fluorescence microscope, and a Zeiss ConfoCor2 fluorescence correlation spectroscopy unit, and digital light microscopy for image acquisition, processing, and analysis.