Cellular Biophysics and Optical Imaging

  • Spectrophotometer for hemolysis assays.
  • Microfluidic system for cellular video-assays.
  • Stopped flow spectroscopy for cellular assays and protein interactions.
  • Quench flow for membrane transport characteristics.
  • Stable isotope ratio analyzer.
  • Olympus IX73 microscope with halogen and LED lamps and 532 and 655 nm diode lasers: brightfield, darkfield, fluorescence, TIRF, Acton SpectraPro grating spectrometer for imaging spectroscopy, Hamamatsu ImagEM X2 EMCCD camera.
  • Biotek Synergy HTX microplate reader with absorption, fluorescence, and luminescence readout modalities. Includes wavelength range from 200 - 999 nm and temperature and shaking control.
  • Countess II automatic cell counter.
Optical microscope Ocean Optics, USB 2000+UV-VIS-ES controlled by computer through LabVIEW
Cut-Open voltage-clamp using a model cell

Preparatory/Analytical

  • Becker 50000 RPM ultra-centrifuge.
  • Small benchtop instruments (sonicators, vortex, hot stirring plates, rotovaps).

Optical Spectroscopy Instruments

  • UV-Visible spectrophotometer.
  • Steady-state fluorometer.
  • Spectrometer for fluorescence and fluorescence anisotropy decay.
  • Raman spectrometer.
  • Circular Dichroism spectrometer.
  • Benchtop laser irradiation system.
  • Ocean Optics UV Vis spectrometer.
  • Optical Parametric Oscillator (Ekspla, NT342B) tunable laser from 400-2600nm.
  • Maestro energy meter with calibrated detector and attenuator.
  • Dynamic Light Scattering System (Malvern Instruments, Zetasizer, Ultra).
  • Ocean Optics, USB 2000+UV-VIS-ES controlled by computer through LabVIEW.
  • Horiba, iHR 320 four ports with digitally controlled slits, tungsten halogen lamp, sample compartment for absorption, reflection and transmission measurements, TE cooled PMT, PMT, Open Electrode CCS.
  • Photoacoustic spectroscopy (custom 4 quadrant detector for all optical photoacoustic spectroscopy and PZT transducer).
laser exposure radiation on biological samples
Dynamic and Electrophoretic Light Scattering System

Computing Resources

  • Dell CPU cluster (aggregate disk space: 248 TB; CPU cores: 364; Memory: 1.2 TB; including 4 RTX 6000, 4 A6000 GPUs etc. FP32: 0.323 peta FLOPs).
  • GPU server (7 Nvidia Tesla C2070, 444 processors each one, 12 CPU cores).
  • Mac Pro cluster (44 CPU cores).
  • 48 TB NAS storage and backup system.
  • UTSA's high-performance computing cluster ARC.
  • Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
ARC high-performance computing cluster
Texas Advanced Computing Center