Rutgers Radiation Research Facilities

Radiation Research Laboratory

 

 

The Division of Radiation Research is housed in the New Jersey Medical School Cancer Center. The facilities in the Cancer Center are outstanding. This Cancer Center mission and architectural design is tailored to promote interaction between scientists in an integrated interdisciplinary manner. Our students and fellows have found this new environment to be scientifically stimulating. Each student and post-doc has their own desk area with computer, a large amount of work-space, and full access to all core facilities in the Cancer Center. It provides an exceptional training environment which will foster the mentoring of radiation scientists. The Division of Radiation Research has been allocated approximately 2500 sq ft of laboratory space. The Cancer Center is equipped with several highly specialized facilities for radiation research that are listed below.

The specialized equipment for radiation research includes the following:

 

  • Gamma-ray spectroscopy with Canberra HpGe low background well detector and NaI detector.
  • Alpha and beta spectroscopy with Canberra PIPS detector system.
  • Beckman Coulter LS6500 automatic liquid scintillation counter with alpha discrimination and computer interface.
  • Packard automatic gamma counter.
  • Dedicated Radiochemistry Fume Hood.
  • Hewlett Packard Model 1090 Series II HPLC with Chemstation software for radiochemistry.
  • Nuclear Associates Comp-U-Cal dose calibrator.
  • Thomson-Nielson MOSFET dosimeters.
  • Portable nuclear medicine planar imaging gamma camera.
  • Mouse cage washers dedicated for nuclear medicine experiments.

 

Additional major equipment in the Radiation Research laboratory includes the following:

 

•  Becton-Coulter Model ZM cell counter

•  Laminar flow hoods (8)

•  CO2 incubators (16)

•  Refrigerated centrifuges

•  Nikon Labophot II upright microscope

•  Olympus CK inverted microscope

•  Nikon inverted cell culture microscope

•  Olympus IX70 inverted fluorescence microscope with camera

•  Olympus dissecting microscope

•  Tissue homogenizer

•  Sonicator

•  Virtis Speed-vac

•  Gel-electrophoresis

•  Liquid nitrogen dewars for cell storage

•  Benchtop and full-size autoclave

 

Offices and Conference Rooms:

Adjacent offices in Cancer Center on same floor as laboratories: Offices are designed to facilitate meetings with up to to three individuals. Two conference rooms are also available on the same floor for research group meetings (large table and seating for up to 16) and seminars (table and seating for up to 24, dedicated computer/LCD projector, PACS). The Cancer Center has administrative offices to support researchers in the Cancer Center building. Shared photocopiers, facsimile machines, scanners and printers are available to the faculty and students. Color and other printing services are available on the network.

Clinical:

University Hospital is physically connected to the Cancer Center . Nuclear Medicine facilities include a PET/CT and several SPECT cameras.

Computers:

The Division of Radiation Research has approximately 20 networked personal computers for word processing, data analysis, image analysis, instrument control etc. One high-speed Sun mainframe housed in Rutgers RBHS Academic Computing for computational purposes. In addition, we have been provided access to the New Jersey Medical School linux cluster of servers for high-performance computing. Our radiation dosimetry analyses are presently being carried out on these two platforms.

Rutgers University supports Dell PCs and Apple Computers and the following operating systems: Windows XP, Mac OSX, and Linux. Office systems include CPU, monitor, scanner, and printer and run general productivity software (Microsoft Office, Adobe CS2, EndNote, FileMaker Pro). Lab systems are similar to the office systems with the exception that they utilize higher performance CPUs and higher resolution scanners. In addition, IT infrastructure at the Cancer Center has been specifically designed from a research perspective. A 10Mb backbone along with 1Gb switches allows for gigabit Ethernet to the desktop. Additionally, the entire facility is equipped with wireless technology. As part of the General Research Instrumentation Facility (GRIF), a 14 TB local storage area network (SAN) has been procured to address the storage of large data sets. Internal sharing of data is achieved with a cluster of file servers. Traffic of bandwidth intensive data is managed by placing core facilities (Proteomics, Confocal Imaging) on dedicated servers. External sharing of data is accomplished with a secure Web FTP system. Basic research and/or research administration databases are managed on a platform agnostic environment (FileMaker Pro 8). The GRIF includes a media center, which houses a 44" wide format printer as well as Mac and PC workstations with graphics tablets and high-resolution scanners. These instruments are made available to support the development of content used for education, publications, posters, and grant submissions. Finally each researcher is provided with an array of applications suitable for research including: Microsoft Office, Adobe CS2, End Note 9, Delta Graph, JMP, and FileMaker Pro. Technical support, from software applications to hardware maintenance, is provided to all researchers as part of the Cancer Center research support infrastructure.

Other Core Facilities and Shared Equipment in the Cancer Center :

 

NJMS supports core facilities to enhance the research enviroment including: 1) Center for Advanced Proteomics Research, 2) Comparative Resources Facilitiy 3) Transgenic Comparative Resources Facility 4) Flow Cytometery Facility 5) Molecular Resource Facility, 6) Bioinformatics Core, 7) Clinical Research Office and Clinical Informatics Center, 8) Microarray Facility (Center for Applied Genomics) 9) The Biostatisitcs Core 9) Academic Computing Services. Five of these facilities reside in the Cancer Center building: (1) the Mouse Barrier Research Facility described above, (2) the Proteomics facility (Center for Advanced Proteomics) with multiple mass spectrometry capabilities [MALDI TOF/TOF (Applied Biosystems ) Q-TOF (Micromass) MALDI TOF ( PerSeptive Biosystem)], (3) the Confocal Imaging Facility and a Histochemistry Core, (4) the Biostatistics Core, (5) an Office of Clinical Research.

Instrumentation for the Cancer Center building includes standard shared laboratory equipment such as high speed centrifuges, microbiological shaker culture apparatus, incubators, -80C freezers, scintillation counters, gel imagers, Coulter cell counters ( ViCell and Z2 counters), laminar flow hoods, etc. There are environmental rooms on each floor. More specialized shared equipment include a Typhoon phosphorimager, P.A.L.M. laser capture microdissection microscope with robotic and fluorescent capacity, an Odyssey Lycor Infrared Imager, and a Xenogen IVIS 200 laser scanning optical imaging system. Microscopes include: 1) two Zeiss Axiovert 200 inverted microsopes with fluoresencet capacity, inlcuding one apotome system to allow for Z stack imaging, each with black and white CCD cameras, and one with an addtional color camera for histology imaging; inlcudes deconvolution , time-lapse, and co-localization software for both Zeiss Axiovert scopes; 2) Motic inverted fluorescence microscope, 3) Olympus upright fluorescence microscope (with CCD camera), 4) Olympus BX40 fluorescence microscope, 5) two stereo-dissecting scopes and one flourescent dissecting stereo microscope and 6) two scanning confocal microscopes (LSM 410 and LSM 510).

The Biostatistics Core Facility provides services to medical and clinical researchers located primarily at the New Jersey Medical School , but also generally within the Northern New Jersey area. Current areas of biostatistical expertise include design of experiments, linear models, non-linear models, multivariate analysis, epidemiologic studies and large databases, clinical trials, categorical data analysis, longitudinal methods, survival analysis and other applications of statistics in medicine. Expertise is also available in the area of spatial analysis (GPS, GIS based data).

Flow Cytometry and Cell Sorting Core Facility

 

  • Three BD Biosciences FACSCaliburs each having a dual laser capacity (an air-cooled 488 nm argon laser and a red diode laser) with capabilities to do up to four color analysis and an HTS sampler for multiwell sampling. One of the BD FACSCaliburs is located in the Cancer Center.
  • LSR II air-cooled four-laser benchtop flow cytometer (BD Biosciences Immunocytometry Systems) with the ability to acquire 12 colors. BD digital software (DIVA) provides both online and offline compensation running in a Windows based environment. It includes a solid-state 488nm (blue) laser, a JDS Uniphase 633 HeNe laser (red), a Coherent 405nm laser (violet) and a sold-state 355nm laser (UV) with the ability to detect 5 colors from the blue laser, 3 colors from the red laser, 2 colors from the Violet laser and 2 colors off the UV laser utilizing fiber optic technology.
  • FACSVantage SE TM with the FACSDiVa upgrade cell sorter, which provides high performance, high speed, multi-color (up to 7 markers) cell sorting, with capability for single cell sorting into multi-well trays for clonal expansion. This cell sorter from BD Biosciences has a water-cooled Enterprise Laser that has a 488nm argon and UV component and an air-cooled HeNe laser for use when more complex studies are required. A Cytek Aerosol Containment System is also available.
  • Amnis ImageStream (Amnis Corporation) imaging flow cytometer that is equipped with 488 nm and 658 nm lasers and an extended depth of field module. This instrument, which operates in a Windows-based environment, introduces a new technology platform that captures high-resolution digital images of cells in flow at rates of approximately 100 cells/per second. It simultaneously acquires up to six different images of each cell, including four colors of sensitive fluorescence imagery, side scatter and brightfield imagery. The ImageStream combines the quantification and analysis of cellular morphology with the ability to perform all the fluorescence intensity measurements of conventional flow cytometry, allowing for rapid analysis and classification of thousands of cells using the ImageStream IDEAS software. The IDEAS software calculates over 100 parameters per cell, including all the standard intensity-based parameters and statistics employed in flow cytometry as well as numerous morphological parameters such as cell area, perimeter, aspect ratio, texture, spot counts and internalization ratios. The ImageStream is ideally suited for quantitative investigations of nuclear translocation, phagocytosis, intracellular co-localization, apoptosis, cell: cell interactions and fluorescent in situ hybridization in suspension.
 
Library:

The George Smith library on the Rutgers RBHS Newark campus receives over 2000 biomedical, life science and allied-health journals. It also provides internet access to over 3500 full text journals and has exchange privileges with libraries of many colleges, universities and medical schools in the New York area. Relevant services include photocopying, interlibrary loans and bibliographic retrieval of scientific information. Rutgers has a site license for EndNote reference database software.

In addition, the Division of Radiation Research has a small private library that houses some of the key journals in the field including Radiation Research (1954-present), Journal of Nuclear Medicine (1972-present), Medical Physics (1987-present). Drs. Howell and Azzam also have a considerable collection of reports and books on the subject as well.