RIKEN Research Center for Allergy and Immunology

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Facilities
Fig.1 Fig.2 Fig.3	In April, 2006, RCAI's Advisory Council Board reported that the services provided by the Center's "central facilities" had been both timely and of the highest quality. The central facilities are the resource and competency pools created by RCAI to provide all researchers in the Center with access to the most advanced equipment and technology. The Advisory Council mentioned that access to these outstanding core facilities had empowered smaller research groups by speeding up the progress of their internationally competitive research projects. The central facilities provide all needs for immunological, genetic, and animal experiments: (1) support for various immunological and cell-biological techniques, such as confocal microscopy, FACS, cell sorting and production of monoclonal antibodies; (2) advanced research approaches in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics, such as DNA sequencing, microarrays, protein arrays and mass spectroscopy; (3) an animal facility capable of breeding as many as 68,000 mice and supporting the generation of transgenic/knock-out/cloned mice and the preparation of frozen embryos for preservation (Table). Some of the equipment is maintained under collaboration with related companies such as Becton-Dickinson for FACS and Leica for confocal microscopes. In addition, proteomics facility collaborates with Shimadz, and monoclonal antibodies facility collaborates with MBL for technological development. Most of the central facilities laboratories are managed by related group leaders (Table). Basically, each central facility lab. is divided into subdivisions which are supervised by responsible research scientists or highly experienced technical staff.
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Table:RCAI central facilities