Principal Investigator: David Gludish

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 

The SARS-CoV2 pandemic has increased the number and depth of collaborations among several virology researchers on campus, centered on activity within Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) laboratories. This work has highlighted the many strengths and some relative weaknesses of the available equipment and instrumentation in CVM BSL-3 facilities, in particular those suited to flexible yet still higher-throughput readouts in pursuit of novel vaccines or therapeutics. Early in the pandemic, it became clear that expanded fluorescence microscopy throughput and flexibility in assay design was an important feature missing in the shared BSL-3 space within the Animal Health Diagnostic Center. This space houses several laboratory groups from multiple departments, and has a centralized access corridor that makes an ideal layout for shared instrumentation. After considerable research of competitive microscopy units, the BSL-3 virology group believes the Keyence BZ-X 800 box microscope offers the ideal features and scalability required for the future of our collaborative research programs.This microscope will be a significant opportunity to build out the research instrumentation of the BSL-3 program at the CVM: this equipment will unite teams researching human, animal and arthropod viruses, and will further ignite several burgeoning collaborative funding efforts among virologists at CVM and beyond that include state-of-the-art fluorescent molecular clones of emerging SARS-CoV2 variants. As the furious pace of the pandemic wanes, CVM virologists can now turn to the longer-term research projects that leverage the finest of viral reverse genetics tools and animal models now available, and we envision the Keyence fluorescence microscope as a central piece of instrumentation to support this effort.