Lab Facilities

Application: This instrument is used for the quantification of targeted volatile organic contaminants. Our previous research projects with the Agilent GC/MS include but not limited to the measurement of the levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in human plasma, breastmilk and human stool samples.

Application: This instrument is used for the quantification of inorganic contaminants (heavy metals) such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, selenium, copper in various environmental sample matrices such as surface water, sea water, sediment/soil, biological tissue (fish and mussels), and tobacco waste leachate.

Application: This instrument is s particularly powerful tool in order to identify non-targeted compounds. Compounds are separated with the unique technology of 2- separate GC columns thus enabling to the identification of compounds that would co-elute by using only one column (in the single quadrupole GC/MS mentioned above). The previous research projects, which have utilized this instrument, include the identification of organic compounds (e.g. PCBs, PBDEs, and PAHs) in dolphin blubber, human breast milk, tobacco leachate, and house dust.

The Sant lab uses microscopy and molecular biology techniques to assess the consequences of toxicant exposures. The lab is equipped with a Nikon Ti-2 inverted epifluorescent microscope with deconvolution and advanced imaging software, a Bio-Rad CFX96 thermal cycler, a BioTek Synergy LX fluorescent plate reader, and electrophoresis boxes.

The Sant lab uses microscopy and molecular biology techniques to assess the consequences of toxicant exposures. The lab is equipped with a Nikon Ti-2 inverted epifluorescent microscope with deconvolution and advanced imaging software, a Bio-Rad CFX96 thermal cycler, a BioTek Synergy LX fluorescent plate reader, and electrophoresis boxes.

Application: This instrument performs for cleanup of samples, which contains lipids prior to GC/MS analysis. The samples include marine mammal samples, and human sourced materials (e.g. breastmilk samples). It allows the removal of up to 0.5g of lipid in fatty samples using an Express column (50:50 Ethyl acetate/cyclohexane) typically in a time of 25 minutes per sample.

Application: This instrument is used to measure the level of mercury directly in both solid and liquid samples. It does not require any digestion of solid or liquid samples before analysis. Previous studies include measurement of mercury level in marine oysters from San Diego Bay and fish from the San Diego River.

These perform detailed analysis of the data from the Leco comprehensive two-dimensional GCxGC/TOF-MS. The ChromaTOF software is able to process a large number of chromatographic peaks (most cases 5000-10000 peaks are processed) and to identify compounds based upon a pre-installed library search.

The Sant lab utilizes the zebrafish model to study the impacts of environmental pollutants. This lab uses a fully automated Aquaneering zebrafish habitat with water quality controls as a breeding facility.

14 computers are available for School of Public Health students and faculty members. Several common data packages are pre-installed such as SPSS and SAS (for those who need to use for class assignments and group projects) as well as ArcGIS, and the complete suite of Microsoft Office software.