Acquisition of 2 Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometers

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A grant has been awarded to the University of Miami under the direction of Dr. Leonel Sternberg for the acquisition of two stable isotope ratio mass spectrometers. These two instruments will provide isotopic analysis of samples from several funded research projects at the University of Miami and other institutions. The two instruments will also serve as teaching tools for graduate students involved in the above projects, as well as introducing undergraduate students to state of the art scientific techniques. The acquisition of these automated instruments will greatly facilitate the generation of data by different research groups at UM. First, by being an in-house facility, it will greatly increase the speed by which results are obtained. Second, the instruments will be tailored to the specific analysis necessary by each group. Lastly, being automated systems, these instruments will greatly decrease the cost of sample analysis. The research projects that will be advanced by the utilization of this instrument include research in topics such as: water conservation in the Everglades and savanna ecosystems of central Brazil, development of analytical tools towards the understanding of past and present climate change and aspects of nitrogen metabolism. These two instruments will also serve an important part in the University of Miami commitment towards graduate and undergraduate education. Graduate students will have full access to the instrumentation once trained in their operation. Graduate students will realize the full potential of this "high tech" approach towards solving problems ranging in scale from metabolic biology to global ecology. This will be one of the many efforts at the University of Miami to prepare our graduate students towards understanding the application of state of the art scientific techniques to biological problems. In addition one of the CoPI's has several outreach programs focused in bringing under represented minorities to the research experience and these instruments will be utilized towards this goal. The impact of the research utilizing these two instruments will cover several important areas such as water management in South Florida, biomedical aspects of metabolism, climate change and hydrology.