Core Facility > About Us

What We Are

The Center for Advanced Technology is a collection of instrumentation dedicated to serving the research needs of the UCSF and QB3 communities. Our primary focus is on instrumentation for high-throughput experimental biology, but we are also interested in any instrumentation too large or complex to be maintained by a single laboratory.

The instrumentation in the CAT has been funded by a variety of sources. The first instruments were purchased with funds from grants to Erin O'Shea, Joe DeRisi, and Jonathan Weissman, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Sandler Program in the Basic Sciences. We are also supported by funds from the California Initiative for Quantitative Biomedical Research and the UCSF School of Medicine.

Through partnerships with other UCSF groups and core facilities, we are also able to provide access to additional instrumentation. A Biacore T100 and 1000 instrument are available via the Macromolecular Structure Group (MSG). Funds for the purchase and maintenance of the Biacore T100 were obtained from the NIH SIG Program and the Sandler Program in the Basic Sciences. Access to a BioForce Nano eNabler is provided by the UCSF Biomedical Micro and Nanofabrication Center.

In addition, we have formed partnerships with companies interested in loaning equipment to our facility. These alliances provide our researchers with cutting edge equipment. In exchange, these companies' equipment is vetted by the highly talented researchers that utilize our facilities. If your company would like to discuss forming a partnership with the CAT, please contact us for more information.

The CAT is also the home of the new Nikon Imaging Center and the Lab for Cell Analysis cell sorter. The Nikon Imaging Center boasts a spinning disk confocal, swept-field confocal, TIRF, time lapse, 6D high throughput, and spectral confocal microscopes. The LCA cell sorter is the BD Aria with three laser excitation lines and 9 detector channels. It is capable of sorting up to four populations simultaneously, as well as 96-well plate sorting.

Where We Are

The CAT is on the Mission Bay Campus in Genentech Hall. The equipment managed by the CAT is primarily located in Room S252.

The CAT is unlocked during the day. For after-hours access, you will need to have you ID card programmed into the card swipe. If you would like your card encoded, please contact us with your request. Please include the number from the back of your ID card, as well as a dpa/fund for the Facilities Management charge associated with this service.

What We Do

• Enable the rapid completion of genomic and proteomic projects
• Centralize the information related to these projects
• Ensure that the information we provide is the most up-to-date
• Provide training for performing genomic and proteomic experiments
• Provide training on the related equipment
• Provide training in the bioinformatics required for interpretation of genomic and proteomic experiments
• Manage the use and sharing of the related equipment