Facilities

Facilities

Ashoka’s Biology laboratories are fully-equipped with essential and advanced instruments which facilitate innovative research projects. The facilities available to the Biology department include: Open Lab Facility, Insect Culture Facility, Fish Facility, Plant Research Facility, Analytical Instrumentation Facility, and Ashoka Imaging Facility.

Open Lab Facility

At Ashoka there are no boundaries between individual labs, i.e we have an ‘open lab’ culture. This promotes scientific and intellectual interactions, increasing the synergy among participating research groups and opens up collaborative approaches to address biological questions. Our research facility is fully equipped to help our undergraduate students, PhDs as well as faculty members to take their studies and research forward. Our open lab facilities make learning more experiential and enjoyable.

Insect Culture Facility

The insect facility is equipped with rearing and growth chambers, microscope stations for sorting and typing insects, piped CO2 plate anesthesia, dissection, and electrophysiology rigs.

Fish Facility

The fish facility facilitates work of researchers who wish to utilize fish as a model organism for any kind of research along with daily care of the animals and aquarium systems. Currently, this involves a large fish housing system with automated cleaning, temperature monitoring, and pH and salinity maintenance. The fish are maintained on a 14:10 light: dark cycle and they are fed once daily from a culture of brine shrimp. 

Plant Research Facility

Our Plant Research Facility has an environmentally controlled greenhouse (fan and pad cooling system) and a shade house. This provides plant material required for undergraduate experiments and research with different plant and insect species under enclosed conditions. It also houses algal growth chamber with programmable light intensity up to 330μmoles/m2/s.

Analytical Instrumentation Facility

The facility houses –

1. Single-molecule covalent magnetic tweezers that can apply physiological forces on a single biomolecule. 
2. Real-Time PCR (Proflex)
3. Preparative Instrumentation Facility
4. High-speed centrifuge
5. FPLC
6. Plate reader (Cladiostar)

Ashoka Imaging Facility

Seeing is indeed believing! Recent advances in light microscopy have revolutionized our understanding of various sub-cellular biological phenomena at nano-metre resolution. Ashoka Imaging Facility supports the department’s diverse microscopy needs through a variety of microscope systems.  Currently the facility houses the following instruments :

1. Olympus BX63 Upright epi-fluorescence 

2. FemtoJet Microinjector on Olympus IX53 inverted microscope 

3. Leica Polarizing microscope (at Soft Matter Research Lab, Physics Department)

4. Olympus SZX16 stereo-zoom epi fluorescence microscope 

5. Olympus IX81 with W1 Spinning Disc confocal Microscope 

Additionally the department is also equipped with multiple dissection scopes for Drosophila and C. elegans manipulation.