Pharmabiz
 

CCMB commissioned NMR to curtail use of animals for drug testing

Our Bureau , HyderabadFriday, January 18, 2008, 08:00 Hrs  [IST]

As part of its efforts to create centralised facilities to pursue new and modern techniques in the interdisciplinary areas of biology, the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) commissioned the NMR Micro imaging and High Resolution Spectroscopy facility. According to the scientists in the CCMB, the NMR spectroscopy is intended to gain insights into the effects of drug molecules at the cellular level and for obviating the need for animal use for conducting scientific studies. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) funded the facility. Apart from it, the CCMB also installed Transmission Electron Microscope with the cryo accessories for ultrastructural studies. It is a high performance DNA analysis platform. The institute is now equipped with Sequenom's MassArray system for precision measurement of genetic target material and variations therein (SNP), a high speed flow cytometer, MoFlo for stem cell sorting, a state-of-art Advanced Optical Tomography System (APOTOME), an advanced Cytogentic workstation, MetaFe-4 for automatic metaphase finding in bright field and florescence. The scientists also created "a high performance computational server (HCL infiniti global line 4-way) with dual core 64 bit architecture with 4 nodes (1.5 GHz CPU each) on Linux platform to strengthen Bioinformatics and information technology facility.

 
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