Ambergen

Ambergen is located at 313 Pleasant Street, Watertown, MA. The modern state-of-the-art building houses Ambergen's laboratories and corporate offices.

Major facilities include:

Cell Culture & Biohazard Laboratories

All of Ambergen's laboratory space is BL2 compliant and licensed for handling microbiological and mammalian cell cultures as well as diseased and normal human tissue and biological fluid samples. This includes 2 fully equipped main laboratories, a separate dedicated BL2 compliant mammalian cell culture laboratory, and a separate dedicated BL2 compliant tissue processing laboratory.

Molecular Biology & Sample Handling

Ambergen is fully equipped for microbiological cell culture for routine molecular biology procedures including recombinant DNA and gene cloning. Ambergen is also fully equipped for both end-point PCR and real-time PCR applications, including separate dedicated PCR-control and pre-PCR rooms for low-copy high sensitivity PCR applications.

Proteomics, Mass Spectrometry & Microarrays

This state of the art laboratory includes a newly installed ABI 4800 Plus MALDI TOF/TOF™ Analyzer with TOF/TOF™ optics technology. This MS integrated system features a compact vertical design and novel OptiBeam™ on-axis laser irradiation. A second PE Biosystems Voyager DE bench-top MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer is also available with a dedicated computer workstation, software for data acquisition and analysis, and a robotic workstation for automated sample application;

Organic Chemistry

Preparative and analytical organic chemistry instrumentation for performing multi-step syntheses of highly specialized chemical compounds. Major equipment includes chemical fume hoods; rotary evaporator; Waters HPLC system with a 600S controller/pump, Rheodyne 7255 injector and a 996 PDA diode array detector system.

Spectrometers & Plate Readers

Fully equipped HP 8543 multi-diode array-based spectrophotometer for UV/visible spectrometry including a computer controlled temperature cell and multi-cell translator; Tecan Spectrafluor Plus plate reader capable of reading fluorescence, luminescence and absorbance in up to 1536-well plates; PerkinElmer Victor Light 1420 luminescence plate reader; 96-well Fluoroskan fluorometer; High throughput screening capable PerkinElmer EnVision 2100 Multilabel Plate Reader.

Computer Systems

Ambergen technology infrastructure consists of a gigabit switched Ethernet environment available to servers and a 100-megabit switched Ethernet environment available to users. The research needs are fulfilled by a suite of 15 Windows XP based workstations, 1 Windows Server 2008 based, 4 Windows 2003 based, 2 Windows 2000 based, and 4 Linux based servers. The services offered by these servers include web, e-mail, secure FTP, DNS, group policy and several others. These servers accommodate approximately 25 users and the projects storage and applications used for the research of this organization. These servers run on the latest UNIX, Linux and Windows operating systems. The process of maintaining system and perimeter security, complying with privacy and security policies and system maintenance are the portfolio of the Ambergen CSO and IT staff. The voice video and data infrastructure are constantly assessed and upgraded for the needs of the Ambergen community.

The Ambergen laboratory is covered by a wireless 802.11b/g wireless LAN. Security and authentication to this network are accomplished by a RADIUS authentication ensuring that only authorized affiliates have access to the data network. Ambergen also utilizes several Xerox WorkCenter Pro 90 copier, fax and scanner. Each system is capable of printing 90 pages per minute, creating PDF’s and sending documents as e-mail. Ambergen utilizes two RAID level 2 arrays for data warehousing and storage. Research storage space is available on the RAID arrays for a doubly redundant capacity (triply redundant in the case of mission critical applications) of several hundred gigabytes. Backups are done each night of all servers and select critical workstations. The total storage capacity for all servers and RAID arrays approach a total of 3 TB.