Much of our equipment is available for outside use by industry partners and other organizations on a fee-for-service basis. To learn more information about the kinds of equipment available for use, please contact Tomy Ames, Director of Research Enabled, at Tomy@ResearchEnabled.org.
For technical questions about our capabilities, please contact Keith Stine, kstine@umsl.edu
Cell culture: A secure Cell Culture laboratory was established in 2007 in the Chemistry Research building by Professor M. R. Nichols and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. This facility is solely for cell culture use and houses 3 Nuaire laminar flow hoods, a refrigerator/freezer, a manual defrost freezer, four water-jacketed CO2 incubators, a liquid N2 cryosystem for box storage of frozen cell lines, a swinging bucket centrifuge, and two inverted microscopes (one is an Olympus CKX41 with an attached digital camera). The facility is outfitted with all necessary items for cell culture, including sterile disposable pipets and filter units, hemocytometers, water baths, power pipettors, etc. A Nexcelom Cellometer Vision Trio brightfield cell profiling system is available for automated cell counting. Dr. Nichols supervises the cell culture facility and oversees its operation and maintenance.
A laboratory of 330 square feet in the Research Wing houses additional instrumentation, including a Jasco J-1500 circular dichroism (CD) spectropolarimeter outfitted with an SFS-492T Peltier thermostatted stopped-flow accessory and a Perkin-Elmer Victor 3 multi-mode absorbance/fluorescence plate reader (with computer). The J-1500 CD instrument also has fluorescence and absorbance capabilities and is run by a dedicated computer system wired to the network for data saving and management. Additional shared equipment includes a BioRad ChemiDoc MP gel imaging system, BioRad CFX96 quantitative real-time PCR instrument with a C1000 thermal cycler, more plate readers, various models of floor and tabletop centrifuges, and a scintillation counter housed and available in either the Biology department which shares the complex with Chemistry & Biochemistry.
Magnetometer Facility contains a Quantum Design Physical Property Measurement System (PPMS) instrument that operates at various magnetic fields (0 ≤ ±9 Tesla) and temperatures (1.8 - 400 K). It is equipped with a helium recovery system and a sensitive ACMS-II sample probe, which measures magnetic susceptibility under both static dc and dynamic ac fields and frequencies (0 ≤ Hac ≤ 3 Oe; 0 ≤ ≤ 10 kHz); vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) is also available. Ultra-low field, resistivity, and photomagnetic (280 - 1100 nm, TLS120Xe) measurements are also possible.
For more information, please contact Dr. Stephen Holmes.
The Mass Spectrometry Facility is housed in a 1000 sq. ft laboratory located in the UMSL Research Building (R003). In addition to the mass spectrometers described below, there are areas for data processing, instrument maintenance, parts storage, and sample preparation. The instrumentation is used primarily for the support of research and teaching in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. However, in years past, the MS facility has been a resource for the local businesses or academic community members who lacks this instrumentation.
Bruker Maxis Plus (maXis HD) quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer and UHPLC: It comes with Electrospray ionization, atmospheric pressure photoionization, and a solids probe for ionizing solids directly. It can do m/Δm = 60,000 and collect up to 20 spectra per sec.
The department’s most recent MS instrumental acquisition is an Agilent 6220 Accurate-Mass Time-of-Flight (TOF) LC/MS system, which provides high sensitivity and mass accuracy sufficient to identify molecules. In addition, ionization via either electrospray or atmospheric pressure ionization makes the system exceptionally versatile, and MassHunter software supports qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry TSQ Altis Triple Quad
ThermoFisher Scientific TSQ Altis Triple Quad Mass Spectrometer equipped with Vanquish binary pump and Triplus autosampler. TSQ Altis is suitable for Pharma/Biopharma, Environmental, Food Safety, and Omics studies. The instrument has a mass range of 5 - 2000m/z with a maximum resolution of 0.2 FWHM. Some of the outstanding features of the instrument are a maximum of 30,000 transitions per run, polarity switching in < 20 msec, dynamic interscan time, 600 SRM/sec, and a signal-to-noise ratio of 500,000:1.
HP 6890 GC with Agilent 5973 Mass Selective Detector. For routine mass spectral analysis following capillary column gas chromatography (GC) separation with Electron impact (EI) and chemical ionization (CI) capabilities. Set up for the latter is pending. Also included: Workstations for data processing and library spectral searching.
