High Throughput Screening Facility

The High Throughput Screening Teaching, Research, and Training Facility is currently under construction. A $1.3 million grant from the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education was obtained in August of 2000 under Governor Whitman's High-Tech Workforce Excellence Grant program. The facility will support new and updated laboratory courses in high throughout screening and laboratory robotics and will enhance faculty research. Equipment for the facility will be housed in a teaching laboratory on the first floor of the new addition of Foran Hall, slated for completion in October of 2000. It is projected that the Facility will be fully operational in January of 2001. Industry participation in developing this facility is welcome.

Equipment in the HTS Facility is to include:

• Beckman-Coulter Biomek and Orca Robotics with supplementary modules
• Automated robots for bacterial colony picking and microtitre plate replication
• DNA chip microarrayer and reader for gene detection and expression analysis
• Automated HPLC and GC-MS for rapid chemical analysis of samples

New Undergraduate Course in High Throughput Screening for Spring 2002

11:126:484 High Throughput Screening
Application and use of robotic equipment in the analysis of large numbers of samples. Assay and protocol design for high throughput screening. Data collating, analysis, and interpretation from large numbers of samples. Applications in various life science industries.

Prerequisites: 11:115:403 General Biochemistry, 11:115:413 Experimental Biochemistry, 11:126:491 Molecular Genetics, and 01:447:390 General Microbiology
3 credits: three 80 minute periods of laboratory and one 80 minute lecture per week

Dean Bruce Carlton talking to Governor Christine Whitman about the Cook College high throughput screening initiative during the Alumni Legislative Reception at the War Memorial in Trenton (June, 2000).

Gerben Zylstra explaining to Governor Whitman how the Beckman Biomek equipment will be used to train students in high throughput screening.