Renovations begin soon

We are in the middle of reviewing the designs for the lab renovations of the space that will house our prep lab and the instrument room.

The prep lab will have two digestion hoods and a weighing robot that will allow us to get the individual kernel/bean weights for the thousands of corn and soybean samples that we will be running. When we analyze arabidopsis, we can calculate the weights for the samples better than we can actually measure them with a 5 place balance (you can read about the weight calculation and see a powerpoint presentation of how it works here). Due to the much higher starch, oil or protein content of agricultural seeds, the proportion of the seed containing most of the elements is a much small proportion of the total seed. This would throw off the weight calculation so we are going to actually weigh each seed individually. Hence the need for the robot.

The Instrument lab will have two Perkin Elmer inductively coupled plasma (ICP) spectrometers: An Optima 7300DV optical emission spectrometer (OES) and an Elan DRC-e.