This laboratory, otherwise known as the cell culture facility, is actually a suite of three rooms. The outer-most “dirty” room features lockers where students store their backpacks, jackets, laptops, etc. The next room contains all of the equipment and supplies students will need for their experiments. It also features a nano-pure water unit that produces water of 18.5 mega-ohms resistivity, or the purest, cleanest water available. Students will also access safety gear in this room, including gloves, lab coats and eye wear.
The inner-most room in this lab is the clean culture room. Here, juniors and seniors learn how to maintain, manipulate and analyze cancer cell lines and stem cells. They will also learn about plant cell culturing to design plant-based therapeutics for developing drugs, and they will study the effect of pharmaceutics on living cells. Students will learn how to work in extremely sterilized conditions so that the end product or process they develop can be delivered in a sterilized, useable and viable form, if needed. “You can’t teach students sterility unless you have an environment for them to learn it,” said Afshan. “We want to prepare them for cell and tissue engineering, and we won’t know the outcome of an experiment if there is contamination. It’s very important for students to learn how to keep everything clean.” An important aspect of this lab is the steel chamber, double-door autoclave, which is generally only available in graduate-level molecular biology labs. The autoclave is accessible from both the stock room and the BSL II lab, and is instrumental in sterilizing glassware and liquids and cleaning bacterial waste. “The autoclave is the lifeline of the cell culture facility,” said Afshan.
Instruments used:
- nano-pure water unit; produces pure water of 18.5 mega-ohms resistivity
- double-door autoclave used for sterilizing liquid and glassware
- temperature-controlled incubators to grow cell cultures
- temperature-controlled shakers
- inverted microscopes
- -20◦C freezer
- A-II bio hoods