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:
- 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.
- Nuclear Associates
Comp-U-Cal dose calibrator.
- Thomson-Nielson MOSFET
dosimeters.
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.
