Lab Resources

The Lu Laboratory is a part of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology at the UT Tyler School of Medicine. The Lab is located in Lab C1 in the Biomedical Research Building (BMR), where the lab utilizes various unique research methods to understand pathogenesis and the spread of infectious diseases. Besides BSL2 and BSL2+ lab essentials, our lab has the following equipment:

Customized prism-TIRF microscope and smFRET (single-molecule Förster resonance energy transfer): Using smFRET performed on a customized prism-TIRF microscope, we have been able to elucidate the dynamic nature of viral proteins, their interactions with host cells, and the conformational changes that occur during viral replication.
Biotek Synergy HTX multi-mode microplate reader (model S1LA): This multi-functional microplate reader has units of absorbance plate reader, luminescence plate reader, and nanodrop plate. It is capable of reading ELISA microplates, luciferase microplates, and DNA/protein concentration quantification. We primarily use it to do ELISA and cell-based luciferase assays.
Horiba FluoroMax spectrofluorometer equipped with TCSPC and polarization modules: The Horiba Fluoromax-plus Spectrofluorometer is widely used in photochemistry and photophysics. We will mainly use it for excitation/emission, anisotropy, and lifetime measurements of fluorescently labeled viral particles. Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC) is a highly precise technique used in biophysics and biochemistry for measuring the lifetime of viral particles.
ÄKTA Pure Protein Purification System: The AKTA Pure 25 system is capable of performing various chromatography techniques, including affinity, ion exchange, size exclusion, and hydrophobic interaction chromatography. This versatility allows for the purification of a wide range of proteins, making it suitable for diverse research needs.
Customized Dell workstation: This workstation can run offline versions of Spartan/Flash for smFRET acquisition and analysis and Matlab. This workstation provides computing power for data and image analyses, including deconvolution, quantification, single cell and particle tracking, smFRET analysis, and modeling.
Customized Lamda workstation: The Lamda workstation is for cryoEM structural analysis and MD simulations. CryoSPARC software platform and other structure-solving-related software are installed on this workstation. This customized supercomputer has both Ubuntu and Wins 10 OP, 256GB memory (8 x Samsung DDR4-3200 RDIMM), two NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs, AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX (64 cores, 2.70~4.50GHz, 256 MB cache, PCIe 4.0) processor, three SSDs (12TB, 3xSamsung PM9A3 NVMe Gen4 M.2), and others.