Research Facilities
Revised: 17 Jan 01

The Department of Molecular Biology occupies the upper half (floors 7-12) of the 150,000 square foot Wellman Research Building on the main MGH campus.. Main laboratory facilities are housed on floors 8 through 11, with greenhouses, plant labs, and growth chamber facilities on floors 7 and 12. Typically, each main laboratory floor houses three research groups, placing 30-40 researchers on a floor. Each floor has a full complement of laboratory support spaces -- two instrument rooms, warm/cold rooms, a balance and chemical storage room, a large tissue culture facility, electrophoresis and gel rooms, a dark booth and a specialty dark room, and generous fume hood capacity, including an isotope dilution hood. A two-person, floor secretarial office, the offices of the three faculty members, and a tea/conference room, equipped with full kitchen facilities, are also found on each of the four main floors.

In addition to group- and floor-specific support spaces, each main floor also houses one or more department-wide support facilities. The 8th floor contains an animal storage and prep facility and an instrumentation room for housing major equipment such as an electron microscope or NMR. The main administrative offices, supply area, materials management and purchasing operations, and mail services are found on the 9th floor. Glasswashing, media preparation, and sterilization facilities occupy the north (departmental) section of the 10th floor. These services process all laboratory glassware, plasticware, and pipettes for the Department, as well as supplying a broad range of sterile plates, growth media and buffers. Eleventh floor departmental spaces include the library and conference/meeting room. The meeting room is separated from an adjacent, oversized tea room by a sliding soundproof wall which, when opened, provides 80+ seating for departmental seminars and other social and scientific functions.

The Department’s UNIX, Linux & Windows NT servers & workstations form the heart of a sophisticated network of Macintosh and PC computers and printers. The network provides the vehicle for a highly developed package of genetic sequence manipulation and analysis programs. Macintosh & PC computers are available throughout the laboratories, offices, and in tea and conference rooms as well. At least 2 PostScript laser printers & a color printer are available for common use on each floor with additional laser printers available in secretarial offices. Flatbed & 35mm color digitizing scanners, photographic quality color printer, automatic slide maker, and dial-in remote access servers are also available. Full Fast Ethernet communications networks are provided for, within the Department, to the greater MGH computer network and the global internet. Interactive molecular design software is also available utilizing a high performance Silicon Graphics computer. All departmental computers are provided with a wide variety of state-of-the-art scientific and office productivity software. The Department maintains a number of internationally used World Wide Web servers and databases. Additionally, the department maintains an in house Bioinformatics workgroup to meet the growing needs of researchers.

Two of the Hospital’s major core science services, the oligonucleotide synthesis and oligonucleotide sequencing cores, are housed nearby and run by the Department. Additional services to all departmental researchers needing microarraying, genotyping, peptide synthesis, protein sequencing, and/or amino acid analysis are also available.

The following list is representative of other major scientific equipment distributed throughout the Department: 12 ultracentrifuges, 8 high speed centrifuges, 4 low speed centrifuges, 4 liquid scintillation counters, 2 gamma counters, 4 lyophilizers, numerous computer-driven spectrophotometers, dozens of tissue culture and other incubators, several preparative and analytical HPLC's, an FPLC, an analytical microdensitometer, a fluorescence spectrophotometer, an NMR spectrometer, ultramicrotome for EM sectioning, and a multitude of stereo, dissecting, inverted, and microinjection microscopes. Departmental darkroom facilities are equipped with 2 X-O-Mat processors, an instant slide maker, an automatic print processor, and a Molecular Dynamics Phosphoimager.

Major instrumentation facilities available to the Department within the hospital include several scanning and transmission electron microscope facilities and a FACS cell sorting facility. A BL-3 high level containment facility and a large, full-service animal care facility also serve the Department and the greater MGH research community.