UC: this the internal rate for anyone at UCSC or any of the other University of California institutions.

Academic: this is the "external non profit" rate for anyone at a university or other not-for-profit institution, including some research institutions.

Industry: this is the "external for profit" rate for anyone at a for-profit institution or company.

External users, please contact us to make billing and legal arrangements.

You may see a list of our academic collaborators and industry partners here.

Non-integrated: EnVision plate readers, Image Xpress microscope, Janus and epMotion pipetting robots, PlateLoc heat sealer, BioTek plate washers, BioStack plate handlers, Matrix Wellmate and MultiDrop bulk dispensers

Integrated: Phenix confocal, Flex plate handling robots and Explorer workstation, Echo acoustic dispenser, Agilent centrifuge, Seal-Peel, MultiFlo bulk dispenser.

• If you are using the Phenix, you may use the Flex robot for free. Think of this as a discount since Flex users are typically occupying the Phenix for a longer period of time.
• For the Explorer station, it is the same price per hour regardless of how many components you are using, and regardless of whether you use them stand-alone or through the automation scheduler.

For a full list of equipment makes/models and links to more details, please see the equipment page.

Our instrument fees (either per hour or per assay) do not include disposables/supplies/reagents/chemicals.

Users should plan to bring their own gloves, tubes, ethanol, etc.

In rare cases, items may be supplied by the facility and we must be informed of each occurrence, and then we can be reimbursed at cost using the appropriate recharge, otherwise we cannot restock those items! Or else you must immediately replace what you took with supplies from your own lab.

To be super clear on this point, any CSC supplies are purchased out of our recharge account and therefore must be paid for by recharges so that our books balance. Unlike the research labs that surround us, we do not have research grants to pay for research supplies. We only get equipment grants, and those only cover equipment purchases (supplies cannot be billed to equipment grant accounts). Even though we have million-dollar equipment, our operating budget (i.e. the recharge account annual income and expenses) is small enough that losing some supplies here and there hurts our operations.

These and other rules for using the facility, and the rest of the training curriculum, are found by navigating our guidelines page.

Yes, you pay for training. Therefore all trainees must be sponsored by a PI. See rules for trainees here.

Yes, you pay for project planning meetings where the CSC helps design experiments, and progress report meetings where the CSC helps present data. However, you don't pay if CSC staff are voluntarily attending your seminar or group meeting for their own educational and/or advertising purposes.

No, none of the pay-per-use equipment fees include CSC staff assistance.

There is a separate staff assistance recharge to cover all instances of user training, assay development, experiment setup, side-by-side assistance, and data analysis for your project. We work with you to tailor a solution for each scenario, but what typically works best is for a user (e.g. grad student or post-doc) to be trained during the course of a trial-run assay conducted together with CSC staff, from which preliminary data can be gathered and the assay methods refined, and then subsequent assays can be done independently by the user, with assistance on an as-needed basis. Note that you do not pay extra for staff time spent on general routine instrument maintenance, repair, and calibration – you can assume that you will walk into a fully operational facility. This is the number one priority of the CSC staff.

If you are using the pay-per-assay fee mechanism, it does include all staff assistance:

• from the conception of the experiment until the delivery of the raw data: tabulated plate reader readings or archived microscope images.
• including training, assay development, setup, and side-by-side assistance.
• no more or less than what is outlined in the proposal approved before the assay is conducted.
• assuming that the user can come up with their own assay ideas – the user will be responsible for literature searches and understanding the field surrounding their particular application to make sure the experiment will be innovative and useful towards the Principle Investigator's research aims.
• After that, further help with bioinformatics, interpretation, figure preparation, presentations, etc. would be billed extra.

A disclaimer about staff availability:

Any staff assistance requested by the user is subject to the availability of the staff member. We currently have only one staff scientist employed by the CSC: Beverley Rabbitts. If an assay takes a team of five people, then the user group would need to provide at least four people, regardless of how billing is calculated. You may need to adjust the experiment workflow to be accomplishable by the number of hands available, or ask your PI to assign more of your lab members to the project temporarily, if more hands are needed. Faculty may be able to wrangle undergraduate volunteers from their classes. The primary function of CSC staff is to keep the facility operational, which is a multifaceted job, and must give priority to users who have already reserved the staff time. If the assay requires the staff person to spend five days in a row focused on the assay, then this would be booked a few weeks in advance. Beverley's calendar is visible to anyone logged in with a CruzID, and an appointment is considered confirmed when accepted on the calendar. In an ideal situation, there should be any number of assays being conducted by different groups in the space at once, and the CSC staff would support all of them at the same time, with the individual experiments being driven by the users. And lastly, please be aware that when managing a facility, emergency situations may arise where everything else has to be dropped. Therefore, it behooves the user to become trained and independent. Thanks for understanding! We hope that your booming business using the equipment will allow us to offer more helpers in future.

The money typically goes from the user's Principle Investigator's research account (e.g. grant or startup money) into an account just for CSC recharge fees. This is a "restricted" account, meaning that it can only be used for certain things, and we are held accountable for every line item.

Like all the UCSC core facilities, we are required to operate as a stand-alone business unit, with our income and expenses within 10% of each other at the end of each fiscal year. So our fees are intended to cover all our basic operating costs: staff salaries, equipment repairs, facilities work, supplies used in maintenance and calibration of equipment, and travel to conferences to keep staff up-to-date in the field. Although we look similar to a research lab, we do not have research grants or startup funds that labs get; we are occasionally awarded instrumentation grants that pay only for the equipment purchase itself.

We do have standing support from the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences (QB3 – $20,000 per year) and temporary support from the division (half of the director salary). Therefore, the user fees are going towards half of the director salary and all other expenses less $20k.

For the rate codes used in the Recharge system, see here.

The above are accurate for FY 2023-2024.

The only change from 2022-2023 is that the external non-UC academic rate is the new required "base/internal + F&A on-campus rate now 55%, up from 54%."

In FY 2022-2023 we added the per-assay billing mechanism, added the new integrated equipment (the rates for the old equipment did not change), and removed the "assisted" rates for equipment (keeping only the staff assistance rate, to be billed separately than equipment). Here are details of the changes and some of the reasoning:

• We got a lot of new stuff this year! Certain pieces of new equipment are $55/h (see below for reasons why this is an appropriate price). We added incubators as a new resource. It will be $10 each time you use it, as a one-time fee, to cover the time spent sterilizing it between users, and it includes CO2. We reduced the price of the old analysis workstation to $10/h; it used to be $25/h and that is now the price of our new workstation. See this post about our new acquisitions.
• To make our new large libraries accessible, we changed how the compounds are billed. It used to be 30 cents per compound. For our new diversity library, that would be $19,200 per screen! So by the new prices, the diversity library is less than a cent per compound and the bioactives library is less than 4 cents per compound.
• We simplified things to save everyone some admin time:
  • One combined supplies code/price, it used to be separate for each product.
  • One combined staff time code, it used to be separate for analysis, setup, and assay development.
  • One combined code for several pieces of equipment, it used to be separated. Thanks to the users who provided feedback that this would be easier for them!
  • We no longer have two rates for each equipment – the assisted and unassisted rates. Sometimes a user only needs partial assistance, or they are getting simultaneous assistance at several pieces of equipment. So now the staff time is its own thing, apart from the instrument time. Note that a PhD-level staff person's salary at UCSC is $70+/h (including benefits) so our fee of $45/h is an extremely good deal.
• We added a new mechanism of billing (without removing the old mechanism). For us, billing one fee for a whole project reduces the amount of time we have to spend tallying your usage fees! You benefit because the CSC bears the risk of things not working and absorbs the cost of instrument time and/or staff time spent troubleshooting. You don't need to pay anything until you have the data in hand.

Feel free to view the old FY 2020-2021/2021-2022 rates. 

Fees by the hour will benefit you the most:

• for simple assays, when you only need one piece of equipment.
• for low-throughput experiments, not screens.
• when you don't require any assistance.
• you want to be billed the same as you have in the past.
• you want to be billed the same way as cores such as the UCSC Light Microscopy Core.

Fees by the assay will benefit you the most:

• when you need to create a cost estimate quickly, like for a grant application, and you don't know yet how many hours each step will take or how many tries will be required to get it working.
• when you have a defined budget so you need a guaranteed price, no margin of error or surprises.
• when you predict you will need a lot of hours of staff assistance. For example, it is a really large scale screen, and we will need all hands on deck. Maybe the assay is difficult (precisely timed, finnicky, sterile, etc) or maybe the user is inexperienced.
• when your workflow pushes the limit of our technical capabilities. For example, imaging organoids or 1,536 format experiments.
• you want to be billed the same way as cores such as the UCSC CRISPR Core.

Reasons why integrated workstations cost more than individual equipment:

• The $55/hour for integrated equipment lets you use multiple pieces of equipment at the same time! Say, for example, dose cells with compounds in the Echo using robotics. 7 pieces of equipment are used (Echo, centrifuge, sealer/peeler, robot, delidder, barcode reader, random-access automated incubator) – and that's not including the liquid and vacuum pumps, air compressors, gas regulators, and other peripheral devices. So if you're using two pieces of equipment simultaneously, that would have been $35+$35=$70/h. So you're saving a lot of money versus being billed for each piece separately.
• The integrated parts are much more difficult to maintain and will cost much more for service/repairs moving forward. Take for example the integrated plate centrifuge…it doesn't even have a lid you can open, and it is bolted down, fitting snugly in the inside of an immobilized cabinet – the plate goes in and out through a trapdoor with a robot arm so if it is jammed, you're really stuck (true story!).
• On the Phenix, it is possible to collect over a TB of data per day, so a lot of work goes into data management to keep enough space available for new experiments at all times. So your fee is including this work.
• Note that on a regular confocal microscope (e.g. the UCSC Zeiss 880 for $30/h), a user might collect images of 10 samples (slides) in an hour, whereas on our microscope, a user can collect images of 10,000 samples (wells) in an hour! So it's really a whole different ballgame. Our price per number of images is extremely low.
• This is no ordinary setup. We had to get extensive electrical rewiring to the room with battery-conditioned generator-covered power to accommodate the demands of these new instruments (and we'll need to buy replacement batteries periodically); these workstations are built on special custom-built tables; and we got high powered computers to meet the demands of the image-based analysis and data storage capacity needed during high throughput imaging.

If it helps, think of it this way: while the automation does your work for you at $55/h, you can go do other work for which you get paid at close to the same hourly rate! Time is money, and we truly help you use it as effectively as possible! That's literally what high throughput and automation is for.

Discounts may be available upon advance request for collecting preliminary data for a grant application, when the funded grant would entail using our center.

On a case-by-case basis, we will evaluate ways to reduce the cost of your experiment.

• For example, for a long time-course, we may be able to arrange a discount if you start your time-course after 4pm and then letting it go overnight or over the weekend.
• Switching from 96 to 384, or 384 to to 1,536 format greatly reduces the cost for most workflows (in terms of instrument time, supplies, and reagents!).
• We have some bioinformatics workstations and web-based systems that are free to use, rather than analyzing data while occupying the microscope.

Stay tuned for a potential seed fund opportunity! We also send users reminders for due dates on funding sources such as through the UC DDC and the AD2C.

UCSC and other UCs: base price

External academic/nonprofit: base x 1.55

External industry: base x 2

Here are some examples that are realistic to implement with our existing equipment and compound libraries. The detailed calculations are in a spreadsheet here. Feel free to inquire about your own example experiment!

Example: antibiotic resistance genetic screen $275

52 bacterial strains (wild type, a known resistant mutant, and 50 with directed evolution) are treated with two known antibiotics (puromycin and tetracycline) at 4 doses (0.04, 0.2, 1, and 5 uM plus vehicle control) in triplicate in 1,536 format, and a 600nm absorbance time-course run overnight (timepoints every 15 min for 24 hours) inside the plate reader at 37 degrees C with shaking in-between measurements. User supplies cells, and drugs. User performs data analysis. With instrument/staff time and supplies this will be ~$285. 

Example: cancer cytotoxicity drug discovery screen $16,250

2 breast cancer cell lines (HER2 positive and HER2 negative) are treated with 64,000 diversity compounds at two doses (0.5 and 5 uM plus vehicle control) in 1,536 format, and measured by Cell Titer Glo on the ultra-sensitive luminescence plate reader. User supplies cells, Cell Titer Glo reagent. User performs data analysis. With instrument/staff time, compounds, and supplies this will be ~$18,750. 

Please contact the CSC staff for an official quote for your proposed assay. The formula works pretty well for most assays but there may be some adjustment needed for unusual scenarios.

We bill using the prices that we pay to restock the supplies. For external users, the upcharge helps cover the staff time spent on inventorying/purchasing and facility space spent storing.

Here is a growing list of prices for our most popular items that are validated as working well in our hands:

• $25 ea – Echo-compatible Labcyte LP-0200 microplates from Beckmann Coulter – 384-well, clear cyclic olefin, low dead volume, diamond well, flat bottom, untreated, nonsterile, no lid, not barcoded (based on price for a case of 50 plates, on CruzBuy 20230317). Note that for a project involving a large purchase (>10 cases), contact Beckman Coulter directly to get a discounted bulk rate.
  
  
• $12 ea – Echo-compatible Labcyte PP-0200 microplates from Beckmann Coulter – 384-well, clear-ish polypropylene, square well, flat bottom, untreated, nonsterile, no lid, not barcoded.
  
  
• $5 ea – Greiner BioOne 781080 microplates from Fisher – 384-well, solid white polystyrene, square well, flat bottom, tissue culture-treated, sterile, with lid, not barcoded (based on price for case of 32, on CruzBuy 20230317).
  
  
• $15 ea – Greiner BioOne 782074 microplates from Fisher – 1536-well, solid white polystyrene, square well, flat bottom, tissue culture-treated, sterile, with lid, not barcoded (based on price for case of 60)
  
  
• $10 ea – Axygen green box of 96 tips for Janus MDT.