Instrument Hourly Rates

Weekdays 9am to 5pm, without assistance from center staff:

	EPR	FARGOLAND	PICOLAND	MICROLAND	LIQ HANDLERS
UMN	$100	$120	$70	$60	$80

EPR: EPR 500 (Rm 1-127), EPR 580 (Rm 1-127), formerly Lipscomb lab’s EPR (Rm 1-123). Fargoland (Rm 1-125): Eclipse, TCSPC-DWR optical box, transient time resolved FRET, Bottom-Read fluorescence lifetime plate reader. Picoland (Rm 1-123): Jasco 815 circular dichroism, Spectramax Gemini. Microland: Spectramax Plus384 (Rm 5-274), TPA (Rm 5-279D), formerly Lipscomb lab’s fluorescence stopped-flow (Rm 5-211B). Liquid Handlers: Multidrop (Rm 1-150), Mantis (Rm 1-150), FlexDrop iQ (Rm 1-123).

After hours (weekdays 5pm to 9am and weekends): Half rate.

Non-UMN academic: double rate

Corporate clients: inquire to the Director, Dr. Rebbeck, here. For a long-term project with clearly defined activities, a detailed contract will be negotiated.

Consulting. When staff assistance is requested for experiment planning, sample preparation, data acquisition and/or analysis, a charge of $60/hr ($100/hr for non-UMN users) will be applied in addition to the cost of materials and instrument time.

Other Instruments:
Two high-throughput screening fluorescence plate readers are available to UMN researchers for translational projects, when ready to optimize and scale up for screening large chemical libraries.

• FLTPR Top-Read: Fluorescence Lifetime Plate Reader with up to 1536-well capability. Excitation sources: 473 nm and 532 nm lasers.
• SUPR: Spectral Unmixing Plate Reader with up to 1536-well capability. Excitation sources: 473 nm and 532 nm lasers. 
• These instruments are owned by Photonic Pharma LLC. For information, visit www.photonicpharma.com/instruments.html.

Policies

Instrument usage is charged by the longest between the reserved time and logged time. This facility is organized as an ISO, and fees obtained are used to pay for costs only, with zero profits.

Instrument usage is charged whether or not an experiment is successful, unless the experiment's failure is caused by a hardware or software problem with the instrument, as verified by center personnel.

New users must work with BTC staff to create an account. Please email us using UMN-BTC@umn.edu. 

Every account must have a ChartField String. Users must  use separate accounts for separate ChartField Strings.

Much of BTC is located in access-restricted areas of Nils Hasselmo. University of Minnesota users can have their U Cards activated for area access by request.

Users are assigned appropriate hard disk space for data analysis and storage as determined by the manager. Users are responsible for saving, archiving, and moving their data off-disk before they exceed their allotted disk space.

Notices of repairs, down time due to building air/water shut-offs and any other interruption in service will be sent via e-mail or posted on the web site.

While this is primarily a user-operated center, data analysis by center staff can be arranged at assistance rates. Users are expected to report problems promptly to the center manager.

The center reserves the right to deny center user privileges to anyone who has insufficient knowledge or engages in unsafe practices or other unacceptable behavior.

Schedule adjustments

The center staff has the discretion to make schedule adjustments on short notice, if necessary. Highest priority is given to users who have established a record of responsible use of their assigned time.

Canceling reservations

The center recognizes that occasionally problems with samples or other unforeseen events disrupt experimental plans. Under these circumstances, users can cancel all of their reserved time, in advance of the starting time, using the instrument calendars.

Instrument logs

BTC instrument time is logged when the user logs in to their Idea Elan Infinity account. Users are reminded to log out when they are finished.

For instruments using paper logs, users must fill in the starting time upon arrival at the center, and the ending time, total time used, and account number to be charged when done using the instrument.

Acknowledgments

The BTC should be acknowledged in any publications arising from the data analyzed in the BTC with the following text:

Experiments reported in this paper were performed at the Biophysical Technology Center, University of Minnesota Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics.