The mission of the Academy's Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability (IBSS) is to gather new knowledge about life's diversity and the process of evolution—and to rapidly apply that understanding to our efforts to sustain life on Earth.
Center for Comparative Genomics
The Center for Comparative Genomics was established in the summer of 2008 to serve the California Academy of Sciences Research Division and its students with the resources necessary to participate in the growing field of genomics. The CCG is a three-unit facility that includes a comparative genomics laboratory, a 280-core high performance computing cluster and a CryoCollection of genetic resources. The CCG has three primary objectives: to provide our researchers with the latest tools available from the field of comparative genomics, to encourage large scale collaborative projects with researchers from other institutions, and to attract top graduate students, post-docs, and future curators. Headed by Brian Simison and managed by Anna Sellas, the CCG includes nine rooms, two capillary DNA sequencers, eight PCR machines, two ultra-cold freezers (-80ºC), six desktop computers, a supercomputer, and all equipment and instruments required for DNA sequencing, cloning and computing. Acadmey researchers are currently involved in more than 20 molecular systematics projects, including analyses of Caribbean turtles and seahorses, Chinese melastomes, nudibranchs from the “Coral Triangle,” birds of New Guinea, spiders, beetles, and barnacles from Madagascar, and many others.
More about the lab
More about CCG projects
Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) Lab
The Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) lab consists of a LEO/Zeiss 1450 VP SEM and several pieces of ancillary equipment. The SEM is based on a tungsten thermionic electron gun and is capable of magnifications above 100,000X. Features as small as 50 nanometers can be resolved. The SEM images are in digital TIF format, with a maximum resolution of 3072x2300 pixels. Normally all specimens must be fully dried and mounted on an SEM stub and coated with a very thin layer of gold before being put in the SEM. The instrument has 3 electron detectors, a normal secondary electron (SE) detector, a variable pressure electron detector and a backscatter detector. There is also a vacuum sputter coater for coating specimens with a thin layer of gold (around 20nm thickness) and a CO² critical point drier. The lab is located in a new space designed specifically for the SEM on the lowest level of the building so as to eliminate vibrations that would otherwise ruin the imaging. The lab is supervised by Scott Serata and I am available to either run the SEM for researchers or train users so they can run by themselves.