Facilities

The Molecular Lab & Conference Area

The Molecular Lab contains 6 graduate student desks spaces, animal processing area, and 4 bench spaces. Equipment includes standard centrifuges, PCR machines, refrigerators, -80°C and -20°C freezers, agarose gel electrophoresis, PAGE and Western Blotting set-up, power supplies, gel imager, water bath, incubator, stir plates, rotators, shakers, balances, lab pH meter and portable environmental (pH, salinity, an dissolved oxygen) meter, standard pipettes and electronic multichannel pipettes, a refrigerated centrifuge including a rotor for 96 well plates and a bucket rotor (Heraeus Megafuge), a Tissue Lyser II (Qiagen) for high through-put DNA, RNA, and protein isolations, and two Percival Incubators for organismal experiments.

Our colleagues in our department and neighboring labs are very generous with sharing equipment. We have access to a CFX96 Real-time PCR detection system (BioRAD), ImageQuant LAS 4010 imaging system (GE Health Sciences), and a BioTeK Synergy HTX Multi-mode Plate Reader (BioTek) for fluorimetric ROS assays, colorimetric enzyme assays, and ELISAs for protein quantification; a Nanodrop and QuBit for DNA, RNA and protein concentration, a Covaris Sonicator and BluePippen for DNA size selection for DNA library preps. Schwartz also has access to equipment for mitochondrial isolation and measurements of oxygen consumption including the following equipment: Oxytherm System (Hansatech Instruments) for mitochondrial respiration measurements, Potter-Elvhjem PTFE pestle and glass tube for mitochondrial isolation.

We have an anti-room to the molecular lab that we use as a meeting room, lunch room, and coffee chats.

The Cell Culture Room

The Cell Culture room has a laminar flow hood, two water-jacketed CO2 incubators, liquid nitrogen Dewar for cell storage, Eve automatic cell counter, EVOS XL Core Digital Imaging System for cell and tissue culture applications, water bath, refrigerator, and pipets.

The Animal Room

Amanda teaching Tonia Cell Culture

This indoor facility is a room (650 ft2) that houses a live reptile and amphibian collection used for outreach via the Auburn University Museum of Natural History (AUMNH), and is used for experimental research. This animal room contains space and racks for an 400 individual lizard cages. This room is equipped with work counter space and a sink.

Brown Anole Breeding Cages in the Indoor Animal Facility.

The Outdoor Animal Facilities

Our outdoor facility is referred to as “The Aviary” (historical reasons) and is an outdoor facility for set up of semi-natural environments. It is at a locked and secure location about 1 mile from the Department of Biological Sciences (DBS) on Auburn University’s Main Campus. The Aviary is a Department of Biological Sciences facility used by many organismal biologists in the department. This facility has been completely renovated (financially supported by DBS and the College of Sciences and Mathematics) with adjustable cages over a 32 x 82 ft area that can be arranged into replicate enclosures for short term and long term experiments.

Adjustable Outdoor Cages for Experiments.

High Performance Computing

We have linked storage space on the Auburn University, College of Science and Math server for data storage and running computationally intensive analyses. We also utilize Auburn University's high-performance computer (Hopper): 4112 Cores | 29 TB RAM | 1.4 PB Disk | ~172 TFlops. The Schwartz Lab purchased five compute nodes (128GB of memory each) that allow for dedicated use by our lab.

The Hopper. https://wp.auburn.edu/hpc/

Additionally we use the Alabama Super Computer for bioinformatic Analyses. Access to the Alabama Supercomputing Center (ASC) located in Huntsville, Alabama. The center has two major compute nodes - the Silicon Graphics, Inc. UltraViolet 2000 (SGI UV, 268 CPU cores with 4160 GB memory) and the Dense Memory Cluster (DMC, 2216 CPU cores and 16TB memory). The DMC has 32 NVIDIA GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) chips. The front end node is configured with 12 Xeon E5-2667 CPU cores operating at 2.9 GHz and 64 GB of memory. This gives the entire system a floating point performance of 5194 GigaFLOPS. These resources are free for academic use by faculty and students at public educational institutions in Alabama.

ASC. https://www.asc.edu/

Hopper, our High Performance Super Computer.

COSAM, Auburn University, 2016