New laboratory space starting!
Filed in: Instruments | People
The works are expected to take six weeks, after which we start the Big Move. Watch this space for a photographic record of progress. Photos are now being posted in the ‘PFGotos’ section.
It is a complex move, although the changes to the physical space are not that great - the labs were in a really good state. However, we need to provide supplementary air conditioning for the instruments, a forced air soundproof chamber for all of the foreline pumps, gigabit networking from instruments to server rack, and from server rack to data analysis workstations, a new home for our 40Tb server rack, helium and argon to all instruments from a central manifold. The benchtop mass spectrometers are located along the window wall of the building, and will be isolated from our wet lab area by provision of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall with sliding glass doors.
The move itself is a bit of a logistical nightmare. We currently are located on the first and second floors (that’s the second and third floors to our US cousins :-) ) and there is no lift (elevator :-) ) in the building. All eleven instruments need to be decommissioned, packed up securely, and passed out of the building through a deglazed window. Then, a half mile road trip, and delivery to a ground floor (first floor :-) ) lab for recommissioning.
The Synapt G2 and the Orbitrap Velos are already installed in private suites in the new lab, waiting for us with some excitement. Next priorities will be the Waters Xevo triple quadrupole (critical for our BBSRC quantitative proteomics grant), the ‘grand old dame’ - M@TILDA our original MALDI-ToF instrument, still giving 14,000 resolution after all these years and the Waters GC-T (used for metabolomics and semiochemistry programmes) and the two Thermo LTQ instruments.
We are planning for a down time of no more than three weeks. That’s might be optimistic, but if we can schedule events in the right sequences, we should be back to running experiments in short order.
It is a complex move, although the changes to the physical space are not that great - the labs were in a really good state. However, we need to provide supplementary air conditioning for the instruments, a forced air soundproof chamber for all of the foreline pumps, gigabit networking from instruments to server rack, and from server rack to data analysis workstations, a new home for our 40Tb server rack, helium and argon to all instruments from a central manifold. The benchtop mass spectrometers are located along the window wall of the building, and will be isolated from our wet lab area by provision of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall with sliding glass doors.
The move itself is a bit of a logistical nightmare. We currently are located on the first and second floors (that’s the second and third floors to our US cousins :-) ) and there is no lift (elevator :-) ) in the building. All eleven instruments need to be decommissioned, packed up securely, and passed out of the building through a deglazed window. Then, a half mile road trip, and delivery to a ground floor (first floor :-) ) lab for recommissioning.
The Synapt G2 and the Orbitrap Velos are already installed in private suites in the new lab, waiting for us with some excitement. Next priorities will be the Waters Xevo triple quadrupole (critical for our BBSRC quantitative proteomics grant), the ‘grand old dame’ - M@TILDA our original MALDI-ToF instrument, still giving 14,000 resolution after all these years and the Waters GC-T (used for metabolomics and semiochemistry programmes) and the two Thermo LTQ instruments.
We are planning for a down time of no more than three weeks. That’s might be optimistic, but if we can schedule events in the right sequences, we should be back to running experiments in short order.