CCRI’s Biotechnology and Chemical Technology Programs
The training collaboration between the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) and the Centralized Research Core Facility (CRCF) regularly hosts student groups from Professor Scott Warila’s Biotechnology class and Professor Wayne Suits‘s Chemical Technology Program. Students tour the facility and learn to use the high-performance equipment.
Professor Scott Warila held a Biotechnology class at the CRCF in April and trained his students to use the automated cell counter to count Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells. His students were excited to have the opportunity to visualize the CHO and E. coli cells under our new EVOS imaging system!
Professor Warila’s Biotech class visits the lab annually for tours and to conduct lab work to isolate and quantify green fluorescent protein (GFP) that the students produced at CCRI. GFP is a gene found in jellyfish that can be inserted into other organisms and used as a biomarker to track other molecules as it “glows” green when exposed to ultraviolet light. It is also a great educational tool, as students can visualize a protein being produced by an organism such as E. coli and then extract and purify the protein much as they would in the biotechnology industry. Professor Warila’s students also continue to work with Janet Atoyan on sequencing DNA from fish samples for species identification.
Professor Wayne Suits’s Chemical Technology Program students used the High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) to analyze caffeine samples from the “Caffeine in Soft Drink” project for his students.
Professor Suits said he “would have to abandon the project once CCRI’s HPLC went down” but later he realized the CRCF could provide the support needed. Professor Suits’s ChemTech students visit the CRCF each year to use the Inductively Coupled Plasma Spectrophotometer (ICP) to analyze seafood samples for heavy metal contamination, and the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer (NMR) to confirm the structure of the research molecule synthesized as a capstone project by the Chem Tech IV students. This collaboration with the CRCF provides a vital service to the undergraduate research projects conducted in the Chem Tech Program.
These are just two of the many values that the CRCF provides for biotechnology and chemical technology education in the state of Rhode Island!
The Centralized Research Core Facility’s instrumentation is available for hands-on use to RI-INBRE researchers and the general research community. This facility is the only one of its kind in the state of Rhode Island and contains over $3.5 million of state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation.
Explore the CRCF