Below we provide a description of the facility that can easily be incorporated into your grant applications.
UCSC Chemical Screening Center: The CSC is a core facility (RRID:SCR_021114) serving the research community at UCSC and beyond, supported by the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences and the UCSC Physiological and Biological Sciences Division.
The facility houses a compound collection that includes 17,000 known bioactives from MedChem Express; 8,000 known bioactives from TargetMol; 2,000 known bioactives from SelleckChem; 87,000 drug-like diversity compounds from ChemDiv; 1,262 low molecular weight fragment compounds from Kevin Gardner and Life Chemicals, 10,000 cyclic peptides from the lab of Scott Lokey, and a growing collection of marine and terrestrial natural products from the labs of Phil Crews, John MacMillan, Roger Linington (now at Simon Fraser University), and others. Compounds are typically provided as 2.5 mM, 10 mM, or 10mg/ml stocks in DMSO in 384-well daughter microplates with minimal number of freeze-thaw cycles.
High throughput screening (HTS) robotics are used to test up to 50,000 compounds per day to identify biologically active compounds targeted towards a variety of biological systems, with legacy data available for comparison. The CSC houses an Echo 650 acoustic dispenser at a robotic sample-preparation workstation, two high throughput imagers including a robot-automated Opera Phenix Plus confocal, two EnVision plate readers, three pipetting robots, 6 bulk liquid handling instruments, image analysis and bioinformatics tools and software, and more.
The center is supervised by Scott Lokey, Professor of Chemistry, and managed by Beverley Rabbitts, a PhD-level scientist who assists with project design, protocol development, sample preparation, instrument training, troubleshooting, and data interpretation. There is a structured user onboarding process and interactive training curriculum. Shared instruments are available to trained users 24/7 on a recharge fee-per-hour of use basis, with an online accessible calendar booking system.
The CSC lab space is on the fourth floor of the recently constructed (2006) Physical Sciences Building (PSB). The lab space includes 2 6-ft fume hoods, house utilities (deionized water, air, vacuum), lab benches with table-top instrumentation, shelving, and an adjacent space for supplies storage. Other labs on the same floor provide us with a tissue culture room, ice machine, and autoclave, and within our building there are flammable storage cabinets (in a room specifically designed for flammables storage), liquid nitrogen, dry ice, access to a balance and pH station, and a cold room. Our building also houses the mass spectrometry facility, NMR facility, X-ray crystallography facility, and macromolecular structure and function facility, and adjacent buildings house the microscopy facility and flow cytometry facility.