Facilities for research in the Institute for Ageing and Health
Ageing Research Laboratories:
The Ageing Research Laboratories comprise the Henry Wellcome Laboratory for Biogerontology Research and the Edwardson Building. These buildings house specialist facilities’ for conducting research on the basic mechanisms of ageing and brain ageing.
There is comprehensive office and laboratory accommodation with large multi-purpose and specialist laboratories.
Our research facilities provide a wide range of state of art equipment and laboratories including:
- high throughput yeast genetics robots
- high power computing facility for data analysis and modeling
- 384-well real time PCR, numerous other PCR machines
- assay facilities and liquid scintillation counter
- specialist tissue culture facilities
- Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting (FACS)
- Varian 7 Tesla Small Bore MRI for functional and metabolic imaging
- fully equipped molecular biology laboratories
- histology,immunohistochemistry and neurohistology laboratory
- 2D fluorescence gel electrophoresis for proteomic analysis
- donated brain tissue collections from aged subjects and dementia patients
- Zeiss LSM 510 META laser scanning confocal microscope
- a number of fluorescence microscopes
- electron microscope
- X-Rad 225Kv x-ray irradiator
The Institute also houses the Newcastle Brain Tissue Resource (NBTR). The NBTR consists of a tissue bank where donations of post-mortem brain are stored. It is run as a partnership between the Medical Research Council, local NHS trusts and Newcastle University. Over the last 30 years research using donated tissue has made significant contributions to understanding normal brain ageing and brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson's disease, vascular dementia, motor neurone disease and major depression.
