EBIC Facilities

The Water and Environment Research group at the University of Glasgow seeks solutions to some of the World’s most pressing environmental and public health problems: clean water and sanitation for all; decarbonisation of water and environmental services; sustainable management of the environment; extracting energy and resources from waste; making our rivers, water infrastructure and water services resilient to climate change.

We are located in new bespoke laboratories within the Advanced Research Centre, a £116.5 million flagship research building for collaborative research, innovation and discovery.

The Water and Environment are well equipped and supported laboratory facilities and include range of equipment for environmental microbiology and environmental chemistry such as PCR, qPCR and ddPCR, Flow Cytometry,  fluorescent microscopy and ultracentrifugation for Stable Isotope Probing, GC-FIC, GC-MS, HPLC in addition to a suites of reactors and dedicated wet laboratory facilities for experimentation.

The Edinburgh Genome Foundry (EGF) is a research facility specialised in the modular assembly of DNA constructs using a highly automated robotic platform, with projects as diverse as programming stem cells for use in personalised medicine, living biosensors and the scale up of bio-based recycling technologies.

Automation solutions allow for reliable, high-throughput, and cost-effective execution of repetitive tasks. Researchers can be trained on selected equipment (e.g. acoustic dispenser, Opentrons OT-2 robot, high-throughput microfermenter) to accelerate their research. The EGF team helps design and plan high-throughput projects, using expertise in lab automation, DNA design and cloning strategies. They deliver projects involving long and complex constructs (>5kbp), comprising large numbers of genetic parts, or combinatorial libraries. The platform is agnostic on the host chassis, capable of assembling constructs for use in bacteria, yeast and mammalian cells.

The EGF offers access to the high-throughput automated cell selection platform, the Beacon by Bruker Cellular Analysis, and a range of cell phenotyping assays including qPCR, high-throughput micro-fermentation as well as kinetic analysis. Additionally, it provides access to proteomics and metabolomics capabilities (via Edinomics) and to laser-enabled cell transformation and selection (via the unique LEAP system).

The National Research Facility for Water and Wastewater Treatment, supports research on the inter-dependencies between treatment and distribution processes, condition monitoring and performance of technologies.

The facility offers industry and academia the capability to design, test and operate water and wastewater treatment and distribution systems. It enables research into future technologies such as low energy treatment and nutrient and energy recovery, condition monitoring and performance assessment including development of repair techniques that are less disruptive to supply and system-wide operation and control and integrated data systems. Working with our researchers, collaborators can investigate the inter-dependencies between treatment and distribution processes, condition monitoring and performance of technologies.

The facility also has pilot scale sewer systems, near-real scale wetland reactors and has the flexibility of receiving real waters from a variety of wastewater sources. A near real scale pilot drinking water treatment plant operates to supply sub-potable and potable waters for drinking water experiments.

The Advanced Sensors Lab at Cranfield conducts cutting-edge research and device development on new sensor technologies to address challenges across the water, environment, and healthcare sectors. It has particular strengths in the development of cheap paper-based devices as well as electrochemical and optical sensors. Our sensors lab provides a range of sensing platforms for rapid identification and quantification of chemical, biological and microbial targets in water, soil and other environmental matrices, in food safety contexts and for forensic science applications.

The laboratory’s core facilities comprise three platforms:

• An electrochemical platform for sensor development, including a multichannel model potentiostat for powerful lab-based assay and a small portable format for field testing.
• An optical sensing platform, including a Raman spectrometer, a microfluidic chip, and fluorescent microscopy coupled with an ultra-fast camera.

• Engineered paper-based device platform with molecular amplification such as real-time polymerise chain reaction (qPCR) and loop-mediated isothermal amplification, and a wax-printer for manufacturing paper devices.

Supported research programs have been funded by both government and industry grants, including contributions to the UK national initiatives on wastewater surveillance for COVID-19 and wastewater-based epidemiology.

The Gutierrez Lab occupies approximately 178m² of laboratory space near to a recently refurbished microscopy unit and state-of-the-art NMR facility that is aligned with the University of Edinburgh. All the facilities required for research in conventional and molecular microbiology are located in or adjacent to Dr. Gutierrez’s lab. Available equipment includes PCR cyclers, quantitative PCR cycler, DGGE apparatus, pulse-field gel electrophoresis, conventional electrophoresis, UV-vis spectrophotometer, fluorometer, HPLC system, centrifuges (high-speed and ultracentrifuge), biological safety cabinets and fume hoods, constant-temperature rooms, -80°C freezers, autoclaves, and a wide range of other analytical instruments.  Fluorescent in-situ hybridisation (FISH) and DNA-based stable isotope probing (SIP) are well established techniques of the lab.

Microscope services (light, electron, epifluorescence, confocal, two-photon excitation, scintillation counter and others) are also available in the School.

The Centre for Environmental Biotechnology (CEB) was founded in 2017 with co-funding through ERDF-WEFO and BU aiming at building the capacity and facilitate the research on environmental microbiology, metagenomics, and industrial applications of microorganisms and their enzymes.

CEB is directed by PG and includes DJ, AY, Dr. Olga Golyshina, and Prof. Rob Griffiths as other members. Together, these researchers established a suite of interlinked laboratories sharing equipment, expertise, and knowledge creating a cutting-edge research and training environment focused on environmental microbiology and bioremediation.

During the EBIC project, the CEB facilities will be used for discovery and engineering microorganisms and enzymes for applications in environmental bioremediation including biodegradation of organic pollutants and metal recovery.

The National Wastewater Research Laboratory (NWRL) is a state-of-the-art national research facility for understanding the fate, flow and detection of microbial pathogens in wastewater and environmental waters. Funded through capital investment from DEFRA, UKHSA, DHSC and Welsh Government, the laboratory runs the national wastewater-based public health surveillance programme on behalf of the Welsh Government as well as undertaking research on behalf of UKHSA.