Year 2

This year was spent hiring staff to assist in operation of the Core, purchasing Core equipment, helping researchers begin stem cell projects, hosting CIRM Bridges students, teaching stem cell culturing courses, and taking full advantage of the research facilities offered by the Core. Our Academic Coordinator oversees daily operation of the Core, trains new users, and oversees the Core staff. Two temporary staff supported the Core from June 2010 through the early part of 2011. These staff helped with inventories, ordering, maintaining and passaging cultures, and thereby freed-up time for the Academic Coordinator to work with faculty and students on their projects. A new staff member, highly experienced in cell culture, was hired in April 2011 and currently provides support to the Academic Coordinator and users of the Core. The Core offers three cell culture suites, an equipment room, an analytical room, a microscopy room, and a cytogenetics workstation. The Core also offers state-of-the art equipment which has been extensively used by our stem cell labs at UCR. Some of our equipment is available only at the UCR Core (e.g., the Nikon BioStation CT that enables high content collection of time lapse video data of dynamic cellular processes). The Core was very fortunate this year to receive about 1700 square feet of new space adjacent to the existing Core. This new space, the Stem Cell Core Annex I, will provide us with a conference room, storage space, a new culture room, microscope room, and additional office space for Core users. The addition of this new space will greatly enhance Core operations, enable growth, and allow us to expand Core activities in the future. The Core offered a stem cell culturing class during spring quarter which was taken by CIRM Bridges students and UCR graduate students. We accepted our first group of CIRM Bridges students from California State University at San Bernardino this spring. The Bridges students are currently doing internships in UCR host labs. The Core also supported a new course in live cell imaging and analysis (EE272) which used human embryonic stem cells in most of its lab projects. The Core continues to offer a Sales and Services operation to enable users to buy most items needed for their research from the Core at a reduced cost to the user. This has been very successful and has facilitated use of the Core. The Core facilities have received extensive use and have provided lab space for faculty who cannot culture cells in their home labs. Users have also purchased stem cell cultures from the Core for their research projects. Data collected in the Core were presented in posters at the numerous meetings this year, and our stem cell laboratories published 17 new papers that included data collected in the Core. Our faculty have been using the Core to conduct research dealing with osteogenesis, wound healing, primordial germ cell differentiation, testing scaffolds for tissue repair, differentiation of endoderm, differentiation of microglia, scaling up procedures for growth of pluripotent stem cells, and evaluation of environmental toxicants using stem cells. The Core has created 35 new lines of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from human fibroblast and 8 iPSC lines from COPD patients. The latter lines open the opportunity for Core users to study COPD in a dish. The Core has also created reporter lines of hESC and human iPSC which are available to stem cell researchers. To bring stem cell information to the local community, the Core has been engaged in numerous outreach activities. We have hosted tours through the Core, given lectures at local universities, and provided information and help to others in the Riverside/San Bernardino/Palm Springs area who are working with stem cells. The Core maintains a website which contains complete information on the facility, as well as the resources and services offered by the Core (www.stemcellcore.ucr.edu).