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An audio tour of LIMS

Professor Nick Hoogenraad

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Matt Smith: Welcome to a La Trobe University podcast. I would be your host Matt Smith and today we’ll be taking a tour of La Trobe’s newest building, the Latrobe Institute of Molecular Sciences, known as LIMS. That’s L-I-M-S. It’s a $100 million scientific research centre, it’s six storeys high and it’s a molecular science research hub with thirty-four research and support laboratories. It opens in February 2013. Go and have a look at latrobe.edu.au/lims and have a look at the photos and videos there. Our tour guide will be Professor Nick Hoogenraadd, Head of the School of Molecular Sciences and the Executive Director of LIMS.
Nick Hoogenraad: Well, going down to the auditorium, so the auditorium is on the first floor, or ground floor and it is underneath the staircase that comes up the front of the building. The staircase coming up the front of the building will have four 4.6 metre tall sculptures, which is contemporary Aboriginal art, which are made out of folded aluminium and painted in bright colours and it will be lit from underneath.; We’re standing in the auditorium now. What’s underneath here is very large tanks, which collect rainwater from the roof. We’ve got this reticulated around all the toilets in this building. So we have a 5 star rating, green rating, and that’s part of the green rating, beside the bicycle shed, which is across from the auditorium. So, the auditorium we’re standing in, beautiful isn’t it? It seats 190 people, it has wireless. For people who come early, the first four rows actually have power connections, so you can sit there and charge up your laptops.
Matt Smith: That’s incentive to get there early. That is incentive. So what sort of subjects are going to be taught in here?
Nick Hoogenraad: In the first year we have exclusive use of this auditorium, that is, LIMS does, and we will share it with the School of Life Sciences. So LIMS is the School of Molecular Sciences, Life Sciences.
Matt Smith: We should get as well a bit of background about LIMS.
Nick Hoogenraad: La Trobe Institute of Molecular Sciences, LIMS, actually came out of the fact that we went through a rapid stage of expansion over the last decade, and we were bursting out of our seams. We decided we would put forward a proposal which had some really critical elements which I felt quite passionate about. The first was that we wanted to vertically integrate the education process, all the way from high school kids who come in the outreach programs, through to undergraduate students, and then research labs with early career, PhD students, early career scientists etc, all intermingling in the one building if you like. And number two, we wanted to integrate into the LIMS structure both topline basic research and translation of that basic research into commercial outcomes. And so we have in fact, in the midst of us, two companies that do all of their research here. So it creates an environment where as PhD students are trained, there’s knowledge about protecting intellectual property and patenting. And the other thing, it’s going to be a place where young people, wanting to establish their first laboratory head positions, would come in a strong mentoring environment to set up their first labs and we have lots of those people.; We wanted the architecture to drive the changes in work habits. So, existing work habits in universities are that you’re appointed as a lecturer and you’re given a lab and you’re given an office. In this building instead, all the laboratories, when we move upstairs, you’ll see this, have no doors connecting them. So it’s open right along it. If a person in one lab gets an extra grant, that can’t fit the extra people in, it can overflow into the next lab. You’ve going to have people mixed up, not only labs with people with different expertise mixed up, but different disciplines so there’s geneticists sharing the research space with a chemist, and we’ve got chemists sharing the space with the other two.; And the other thing I notice as we walk through there’s lots of little seating areas where people can actually get together and talk about their work. Can you let us into this door?; Let’s go through the others here.; We’re just walking into the equipment barn, which you see has got a glass front so that ... and we’re on the ground floor, so all the public will walk past here. There’s lovely seating areas for the students waiting to get into prac classes outside. And they’ll be able to look in. I mean, this is high tech. There’s two machines, there are eight mass spectrometers, this is very much the high tech nerve centre for the building.
Matt Smith: So it’s all going to be on display.
Nick Hoogenraad: It’s all on display. That’s the idea. We also have this instrument here, which is actually a molecular archaeologist is using this to actually look at very ancient samples, a mammoth, maybe, to get the dentine out of the teeth and they can actually determine the diets the animals were on from this mass spectrometry equipment, so archaeology is going in this particular direction as well.; We can walk into the prac labs, if you can just follow me. This is a teaching preparation room. Of course the classrooms start in March, so this is first year Biology we’re in now. You can see there are white boards and huge video screens which can be linked up right through the whole floor so the instructor can actually put material on there. Beautiful facilities, bright colours and outside of these laboratory spaces are teaching break-out areas, such as in here. If you can see. So students, while they’ve got an experiment going, they can come in here and write up and they can discuss the work they’re doing and so forth. There are a number of these areas at each of the three teaching levels. So there’s three levels of teaching.
Matt Smith: So two things strike me already is the lovely bright colours and a lot of natural light coming into the building.
Nick Hoogenraad
Matt Smith: And that will kick in ...
Nick Hoogenraad: So particularly for hooking up freezers and fridges and so forth, you know. A plague of us in summer is when people are using a lot of power, we have these surges in power, and that causes us to lose our data of those machines, so we have stabilisers on the power, not only as a back-up to the generator, but it’s stabilised, so we don’t lose our data.
Matt Smith: What colour’s that?
Nick Hoogenraad: And that’s red. We’ve tried to think of everything. Shall we go out, and then we go up another flight of stairs.
Matt Smith: All right.
Nick Hoogenraad: The next level. We decided to go for this artificial grass which is very realistic. We are never going to grow grass under those trees. This will be a very highly used area.
Matt Smith: It is quite realistic.
Nick Hoogenraad: It’s so inviting. It looks like the sort of place where you want to lie down and relax. The other thing that you can see here, the x chromosome, the cross over beams And the side-on, inside is a y chromosome, is in a y shape. So it’s very symbolic. This is the first time that the builders, actually got a development grant to work out how to cross round posts, one over the other, you can see. The other thing that’s symbolic here, while we’re out here, you’ll see there’s a red colour, which stands for oxygen to any chemist or bio-chemist, blue stands for nitrogen, black stands for carbon and white stands for hydrogen.
Matt Smith: So there’s method to the outside colour scheme ...
Nick Hoogenraad: And actually molecular shapes, if you like. So I think even if you didn’t have the sign on it you could see that this is a molecular science building. So you can go up the outside or the inside here, go up the outside. The other rather symbolic thing is there’s this central stairway, to heaven if you like, connecting all levels. We probably don’t need to go in here. This is the advanced biology lab where bio-chemistry and genetics, second, third year level will be taught in here. And look at this, this is a beautiful break-out space. And on a nice day, you’ve got an outside ...
Matt Smith: You’ve got a little balcony there.
Nick Hoogenraad: A little balcony. Let’s go to the elevators on the other side and we’ll go up to the research level. There’s another teaching lab, the third level is the chemistry teaching lab. They do first, second and third year, undergraduate laboratory classes there. And there’s logic to all of this. Chemistry’s on the top floor, the sixth floor, the other graduate laboratories are on the third floor. It’s very expensive to build chemistry labs because they need lots of fume cupboards, so the higher you have them in the building, the less ducting you need.
Matt Smith: Oh okay. That makes sense.
Nick Hoogenraad: And you’ll see there’s four rear and four front. The two buildings are at different levels because the heights between the ceilings have changed, over time, the rules about that. So these things will stop at the entrance on either side will stop on the back side, which gets you into the adjacent building we’re connected to on this side, which takes you to the research space. If you walk around here for a moment before we go in there, this is the common tea room with again, a veranda. We deliberately only built one common room to force people to actually get together and what’s great to see is two chemists talking to two bio-chemists. Already they’re talking across disciplines.
Matt Smith: You’ve just become part of the audio tour, guys. Hello, what’s your name and what will you be doing in LIMS?
Brian Smith: My name’s Brian Smith, I'm a computational chemist molecular modeller.
Matt Smith
And what sort of thing will you be working on in here?
Brian Smith
Drug discovery, drug development. You investigate protein interactions.
Matt Smith: Let’s keep moving.
Nick Hoogenraad: We’ve got coffee machines here so that people are encouraged to come here, free coffee. You’ll have to come across.
Matt Smith: Free coffee’s never a bad thing.
Nick Hoogenraad: So here are the research offices. So this is where the post doctoral fellows and the staff members sit and they have a beautiful view. Have a look over here. I think I might have mentioned before that we have a bicycle shed, that’s part of the green ...
Matt Smith: Is that the bicycle shed down there?
Nick Hoogenraad: Yes. To encourage people to get out of their cars and ride their bikes, and so attached to that is showers and locker rooms and so forth. And we’re not having any filing cabinets in this building. We’re trying to encourage people to go paperless, but we’ve got cupboards that they can put files in for a period of time. So in these open spaces, is where PhD students and technicians sit. And honours students. And here’s a meeting room – there’s lots of those. And then we go to the vestibule, there’s all this storage space here. Lab coats hanging on the wall here, and here we have the first level of research labs, that’s actually my lab. You can see that the boundaries between the labs ... so this is a boundary okay? And there’s another boundary. They’re only semi boundaries, there’s no doors. So we can overflow and stuff like that. We have shared facilities, like there’s a break room that we share here and this is a rather nice thing. Here’s a wash up room and an autoclave where we wash glassware, so that the glassware as it gets washed can be put into these cupboards and people when they need it can pull it out the other side. The reason we’ve gone for that is, people tend to hoard all their glassware, they want everything, and so you need masses of these sorts of things and they fill their cupboards with ... I want them to share, you know. They don’t need to store it because they only have to walk down the corridor and there it’s sitting for them.
Matt Smith: So what will you be doing in your lab here Nick?
Nick Hoogenraad: We’re developing a therapeutic antibody for treatment of a cancer-related condition. This is the terminal stage of cancer when people go into a wasting condition. So there’s a number of tissue culture labs on each level. We haven’t got the incubators here yet because we’re just moving. We started moving yesterday. But there are three of these modules that will be shared. This is a centrifuge room. You can see the centrifuges there. That’s the other nice thing. We have to store our goods in -80° freezers. And you can see a whole lot at -80 and they’re in a special room where they’re connected to back-up power. If the power goes off the generator goes on. Currently we’ve just got a standard power supply. We’ll get a phone call at home, at midnight. The power’s gone off and your -80° freezer is beeping because it’s down to -50. You’ve got to get out of bed, you’ve got to come here, you’ve got to find some way of moving all this stuff into somebody else’s freezer so you don’t lose years of work. Here we’ve designed it to be coupled into ... This is a micro-biology room. We actually genetically engineer bacteria. We haven’t got any equipment in there yet. This is a specialist room for microscopes and things.
Matt Smith: Each level has a similar layout for labs and shared space, and a cool room. 5.2. Okay, I’ve got to go in there.
Nick Hoogenraad: It’s meant to be 4 degrees and we have oxygen sensors in here so if the oxygen level gets low an alarm goes off because people can actually lose consciousness in there.
Matt Smith: And a heavy duty lock.
Nick Hoogenraad: Yes. Let’s go out here because you’ll see one of the features of this building which you can see very prominently from the outside, are these pods that stick out outside the building. For the fourth, fifth and sixth levels ...
Matt Smith: So they let light in without letting sun in.
Nick Hoogenraad: This is a meeting room. You’re suspended over the building. This is the overhang.
Matt Smith: You’re overhanging the building.
Nick Hoogenraad: These are those pods that stick out. Isn’t it gorgeous. So there’s one of these on each of the research floors.
Matt Smith: The building isn’t even open yet and there’s an inflatable dinosaur and an inflatable penguin, over there. Somebody’s already fitting their office out.
Nick Hoogenraad: The fifth floor which is where the executive suite is, also where the board room is. We have a very nice board room. So let’s go to six.
Matt Smith: What’s on level 6?
Nick Hoogenraad: Chemistry. So it’s a slightly different layout to the labs because instead of having benches to work on, they’ve got fume cupboards to work in. So it’s all very familiar and very similar, and this end are the same laboratories as you saw on the other two floors, the bio-chemistry laboratory. Instrument rooms and so forth. From this point onwards, you’re in chemistry labs. You can see they go all the way through because they’ve got the fume cupboards. Here’s a large equipment lab where they’re going to have lasers and stuff like that. Here’s a laser research lab. Do you want to talk to these guys, chemists.
Adam Mechler: I'm a physical chemist.
Matt Smith: What sort of things will you be working on here?
Adam Mechler: Microscopy, all kind of surface bio-physical methods, mostly lipid membranes, biological surface antimicrobial peptides, so we can map the surface with subatomic resolution.
Evan Robertson: Evan Robertson from Chemistry. Also a physical chemist, I suppose or a spectroscoper, so we use light of all kinds of different wavelengths to study the structure and the shape of properties, even quantifying molecules. A lovely new barmon instrument here, which is able to study all kinds of samples, really, minerals through to biological whatever. There’ll also be a whole bunch of lasers still to come up and go on these tables. So that will involve measurements of shapes of molecules.
Nick Hoogenraad: Sorry to interrupt you. Thanks for your help. Okay so we go further, so Chemistry. We get the point that they work mainly in fume cupboards, not on benches. They haven’t left themselves a lot of benches. In here they’ve got glove boxes. They work in an absolute air-free.
Jason Dutton: I'm Jason Dutton, I'm one of the inorganic chemists here and right now I'm just training up one of my new students on how to use the glove box that the School of Molecular Sciences got from my research. The glove box is to give us an oxygen and water-free environment to manipulate chemicals that don’t like to see oxygen or water.
Matt Smith
Is it air-tight in there, is it?
Jason Dutton: Absolutely.
Matt Smith: See you later. Thanks for that.
Nick Hoogenraad: Jason’s joined us from Canada in recent times. But you get better and better views, the higher you go up, as you can see.
Matt Smith: Right. So we’re at the top of the building.
Nick Hoogenraad: You can go to the seventh floor where all the machinery is and see AgriBio across the way.
Matt Smith: Oh yes, there it is down there in the distance. I suppose a good way to finish this audio tour then is, what do you hope to get out of LIMS that you wouldn’t have without it?
Nick Hoogenraad: Well, one thing we’ve concentrated on very much is to mix people up. We hope to see collaborations that don’t exist now. And it’s very much on the principle that when you put unusual combinations of people together with different expertise, one plus one is equal to more than two. You actually get these multiplier effects and we’re going to get to know a lot more what these people do, and they’ll get to know a lot more what we do, and some of their techniques might well apply to some of the things we do, and allow us to do things we’ve never thought of doing before. That’s the sort of thing we’re looking for. And you can imagine, it’s a terrific environment to educate students.
Matt Smith: It’s very open. It looks almost like a chemist’s toy shop. That’s Professor Nick Hoogenraad, Head of the School of Molecular Sciences and LIMS Executive Director. And why not check out the building itself. It’s on the Melbourne campus of La Trobe University. And that’s all the time we have today for the La Trobe University podcast. If you have any questions, comments or feedback about this podcast, or any other, then send us an email at podcast@latrobe.edu.au.

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