Members of Plant Biology also use other campus-wide facilities, such as the Molecular Genetics Facility, the Electron and Confocal Microscope Facility, and the Biological Sciences Computational Resource. The UGA Research Services Division provides a number of other useful services, including electronics and instrument shops.

Computers
The Plant Biology Department maintains approximately 120 networked PCs and Macs running the latest operating systems, as well as four Sun and two SGI Workstations. One of the Suns (Dogwood) is used as our primary e-mail and web server, while the others run a variety of scientific number crunching programs. Recently we upgraded our network infrastructure to 10baseT Ethernet and fiber-optic FDDI running on hardware from Cabletron. We have a general purpose Computer Graphics Room that houses two 35mm Film Recorders, a flatbed and 35mm scanner, and a HP5M Color Laserprinter. Special purpose computer peripherals are also found in a variety of laboratories, outside the main computational facility.

Microscopy and Photography
Within the Plant Biology Department we have an Electron Microscopy (EM) and darkroom facility. The EM lab is home to a Zeiss 902A Transmission Electron Microscope, ultramicrotomes, and a Balzers High Pressure Freezing Machine. Equipment and supplies are available for both light and electron microscopy specimen preparation. The darkroom facility is fully equipped for B&W film processing and printing. Several 35mm and digital cameras are available for research purposes. The facility is staffed by Beth Richardson.

The P.A.L.M. Microlaser system is designed for the precise selection and collection of specific cell types (living or fixed cells) from all kinds of samples. It is considered state-of-the-art in the field of microdissection and uses laser pressure catapulting for collection of the samples for RNA and/or DNA isolation/analysis.

Molecular Imaging
A shared resource has recently been established to facilitate acquisition of digital images from a wide variety of matrices. Major items of equipment include a Molecular Dynamics Storm (digital imaging of radioisotopes and fluorescent labels), a fluorescence/absorbance microplate reader, a Stratagene Eagle Eye video imager, and the computer hardware and software necessary for image analysis. This resource permits creating high resolution digital images from culture plates (6-well through 384-well), adsorbent membranes (Southern, northern, western blots and tissue prints), and gels (protein and nucleic acid).