Physical Location. The Department of Microbiology and Immunology is located on the second, third, fifth, and sixth floors of the Medical School and the second, third, and fifth floors of the adjoining Biomedical Research Institute.

The LSUHSC Research Core Facility (RCF). The RCF is located primarily on the 6th floor of the Biomedical Research Institute, offers instrumentation and technical support for many state-of-the-art technologies. Each major technology is operated by a Research Associate and is overseen by an LSUHSC faculty member, who is a member of the Faculty Oversight Group. RCF and other common facilities at LSUHSC include the following. Detailed information about these facilities can be found here.

Animal Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Containment Facility
Biocontainment BSL-3Plus Facility
Computerized Automated Cellular Imaging
Biacore Optical Biosensor Facility
Laser Confocal Microscopy Facility
DNA Array (Chip) Analysis Facility
Flow Cytometry Facility
Fluorescence Microscopy Facility
Histology and Tissue Resource and Electron Microscopy Facility
Laser Capture Microdissection (LCM) Facility
Mass Spectrometry-Proteomics Facility
Real-Time PCR Facility
Vector Core Facility
Small Animal Bioimaging Facility
Animal Care Facilities
LSUHSC Library
Other Research Support Facilities

Bioinformatics Core.  In addition to the bioinformatics facilities within the LSUHSC Research Core Facility, the Laboratory for Advance Biomedical Informatics (LABi), located at LSU-S in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, contributes to the bioinformatics capabilities of the Center for Molecular and Tumor Virology (CMTV).  LABi equipment is connected through a Gigabit local area network to the department and is managed and maintained by the Department's system administrator, who is appointed by the LSU-S Computing Services.  The lab itself houses an Apple Xserv server, two Mac Pro systems, one with 23" display and one with the dual 30" displays.  Additionally, two MacBook Pro notebook computers and ten Dell dual-boot (Windows and Linux) workstations (Dell XPS and Dell Precision) with dual 21" or 19" displays.  All are running a variety of Windows-based software, including programming suites (Microsoft .NET and Visual Studio, Netbeans, Borland JBuilder, Sun Microsystems NetBeans), in addition to data analysis tools on selected systems, such as R-project, SPSS, Mathematica, Matlab with toolboxes (image processing, statistics, and bioinformatics), Weka, Pajek, and others.

A majority of workstations in LABi are connected to a passive stereoscopic display for 3D stereoscopic visualization (also known as GeoWall) and a 5.1 surround speaker system for sonification (exploration of data using sound), multi-way video conferencing system using VolP and dedicated network cameras, and Access Grid high-performance video-conferencing technology with a 65" interactive plasma display, additional dual projectors and audio and video equipment.  LABi also houses the 180-processor NPACI Rocks Linux cluster, which is one of the largest of its kind in Northern Louisiana.

Collaborative projects are an integral part of LABi.  Using advanced videoconferencing technologies, a joint bioinformatics course between LSU-S, LSUHSC-Shreveport, and the University of Massachuessetts in Lowell is offered.

Common equipment. The major equipment belonging to the Department is housed in several suites and are available to all members of the Department. These items include:

In addition to the equipment suites, several specialized facilities are located within the Department and/or are available to all departmental researchers. These include:

Computing. The computer facilities of the Department are state-of-the art, and all students, fellows, and faculty members have access to the several databases and the mainframe for data acquisition and processing. Information technology for teaching and research is supported by three departments: the Medical Library, the Department of Computer Services, and the Department of Academic Computing. The Library provides computerized access to over fifteen research databases. There are several computer labs (IBM and MacIntosh) that can be used for computer-assisted learning and for word processing, database, and spreadsheet applications. The Academic Computing Section supports the Interactive Videodisc Lab in the Library and manages an additional computer lab that can be scheduled for classroom use. Computer Services teaches a number of computer courses (word processing, Internet, spreadsheet, database, PC fundamentals) and manages a large IBM mainframe computer. Statistical packages, Internet, E-Mail, and administrative and database programs are available through the mainframe. Faculty members and students may access most of these computer resources from their office through the campus computer network (Ethernet or FDDI). LSUHSC-S is a hub for the statewide area network and is an Internet node.

The project described was supported by NIH Grant Number
P20RR018724 from the National Center for Research Resources.