Basic Sciences and Translational Research – Research Laboratories and Core Resources

Laboratory: Department of Surgery laboratory research space is primarily on the fourth floor of the Brody Medical Sciences Building. It is comprised of 5 working labs with space > 2400 sq ft, including core laboratory space equipped for tissue culture, patient specimen processing as well as biochemical and molecular biology studies. There is a walk-in cold room and a glass washing/autoclave room on the same floor. Patient tissue, plasma, blood cells, and RNA specimens are stored in four -80° C freezers.

Equipment: The following major equipment is available within the Surgery laboratories: horizontal flow clean work benches, biosafety cabinets (certified annually), refrigerators, -20°C freezers, -80°C freezers and light microscopes. Equipment also includes Polytron homogenizers, two CO2 incubators, water baths, refrigerated high and low speed centrifuges with assorted rotors, microcentrifuges, analytical balances and Nanodrop and Shimadzu spectrophotometers. ELISA plate washers and readers and a LINCOplex 200 Multiplexer (powered by Luminex xMAP technology) are readily accessible within the building. Electrophoresis equipment includes SDS PAGE and protein transfer units, sequencing gel apparatus, 4 horizontal electrophoresis chambers and three power supplies. PCR equipment includes 2 template tamer PCR workstations and a real-time thermal cycler (ABI 7000) with a dedicated laptop. An ABI 384-well 7900HT Fast real-time thermal cycler is also used that is housed on the third floor. Shared facilities on the floor include liquid nitrogen storage tanks, a Milli-Q water purification system, ice machine, dishwasher and autoclave.

The North Carolina Tissue Consortium (NCTC): The NCTC is an IRB-approved tissue bank located in the Brody School of Medicine in the Division of Surgical Oncology (Dr. Nasreen Vohra, Director). It is supported by the University Cancer Research Fund which was established by the NC General Assembly to accelerate the battle against cancer. The objective of the NCTC is to facilitate cancer-related research by providing a means through which normal and malignant tissue specimens are procured, processed, stored, and distributed to researchers while protecting the rights and confidentiality of participants. The NCTC also provides consultations to help identify and target specimen collection so as to meet the specific research needs of investigators at ECU.

ECU Core Facilities provide equipment and expertise to faculty for a minimal fee. Facilities in the Brody School of Medicine include the core imaging center, flow cytometry facility, metabolomics core and histology laboratory.

Dr. Kim Kew (kewk16@ecu.edu) is the director of the mass spectroscopy core facility, located on the 4th floor of the Brody Medical Sciences Building. There is also a Genomics Core facility and a High Performance Computing Core located in the Department of Biology on East Campus.

The UNC Lineberger bioinformatic core (LBC) provides the infrastructure for management and analysis of large-scale research projects and promotes individual researchers to tap the ever-growing data generated by new cancer research technologies. The UNC Lineberger Translational Pathology Lab provides investigators access to annotated formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) human tissues from the UNC Hospitals surgical pathology archive. It provides histopathology, tissue microarray (TMA) design and construction, slide staining by limited in-situ hybridization (ISH), immunohistochemistry (IHC) & immunofluorescence (IF), and morphological evaluation services.