Department of Oral Biology
Technology and Cores

General Equipment

Biomaterials/Bioengineering:
The dental biomaterials research equipment laboratories (approximately 4,000 sq ft) and valued in excess of one million dollars, is located on the third floor of the dental school in close proximity to the histology-pathology, immunology, microbiology, and periodontology research areas. The electron microscopy facility contains a Philips CM12/STEM, Philips 515 SEM both equipped with EDAX analytical capabilities and light element analysis and a Philips XL30 FE-ESEM, all three with PGT thin window EDS detectors. Also available: JASCO NRS-2000 micro-Raman spectrophotometer; Model 1120 computer interfaced Instron mechanical testing machine with torsion cell; Wilson Tukon micro hardness tester; contact angle goniometer, tensiometer, viscometers, Hg dilatometer, analytical balances; Denton sputter coater; Leitz 1600 saw microtome, Reichert-Jung Polycut S microtome for thick (2 mm) sectioning of calcified tissues; LKB ultramicrotomes for preparing 900 nm sections of calcified tissues; Zeiss brightfield, phase and fluorescent microscope coupled to image analysis system running Optimas software.

Bone Biology Research Group:
A Victor 2 plate reader, absorbance plate reader, two thermocyclers, Real-time Tag-man PCR ABI 7000, power supplies, gel electrophoresis equipment for 1 and 2D gels, Bio-RAD chromatography system, Waters HPLC, Coulter-counter, electrophoresis equipment for DNA sequencing, RNA DNA, and protein analysis, 3 microcentrifuge vacuum ovens, UV-cross-linker, 1 large molecular dynamics phosphoimager cassette for gene arrays, Atlas mouse oligos, the Pat Brown Model for preparing gone microarrays on glass slides, a laser microarray scanner for 2-color glass slide gene chips, a Dionex Carbohydrate analyzer with conductivity detectorFaxitron X-ray apparatus, PixiMus Bone densitometer, Leica tissue embedding center, Leica Cryocut 1800 cryostat, Shandon Hypercenter tissue processor, Osteometrics system for histological analysis, microscopes, camers, image analysis, etc.. Transgenics - a transgenic facility is being established in Room 128 at the Volker Campus animal facility of approximately 200 square feet which will contain an operating room, dissection scopes, needle puller and polisher, Eppendorf microinjection apparatus, Nikon 300 inverted microscope, incubator, biosafety hood, etc. Dr. Feng is director of this facility. Equipment to be purchased in the near future - blood calcium analyzer, Flexarcell apparatus, fluid-flow apparatus, DE-Quest MALDI, Image analysis system for 2D gels, etc.

Computer:
In addition to DEC computers that power the EDAX and image analysis equipment attached to the SEM and STEM, a cluster of Digital Equipment Corporation AXP 2100 alpha servers containing a total of 14 CPU's is located on the main UMKC campus. Dental Faculty personal desktop computers are connected to the cluster with ethernet copper and fiber. Computer time is provided at no expense to faculty. Dental School computers are linked internally with Novell 4.1 software. University based site licenses for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations or graphics, and statistics are available to faculty. We have Image Quant for gridding/analysis of microarrays, the Clonetech program set for image analysis and bioinformatic analysis of their arrays. The Pathways program set from Research Genetics for analysis of their 6000 gone array, the cluster, tree view, and scan analyze programs from Stanford (Brown/Botstein labs) complete SAS package for principal component analysis, and MathCad 8 professional for 3D views maps of expression profiles with accompanying wavelet transfer and fast fourier analysis of patterns.