Rates and support

Instrument Hourly Rates

Weekdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., without assistance from center staff:

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

After hours (weekdays 5 p.m. to 9 a.m. and weekends): Half rate

Non-UMN academic: Double rate

Corporate clients: Inquire with the Director, Dr. Rebbeck ([email protected]). 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 $90/hr ($150/hr for non-UMN users) will be applied in addition to the cost of materials and instrument time.

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 [email protected]. 

For UMN users, 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, downtime 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.