MRI: Acquisition of a flow cytometer to enhance undergraduate research at Wellesley College

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An award is made to Wellesley College to support the purchase of a new flow cytometer. The system will allow students and faculty to make highly sensitive measurements of the properties of individual cells within large populations and at multiple fluorescence wavelengths. Students and faculty will use the flow cytometer to address questions in diverse areas of scientific research, examining systems ranging from aquatic bacteria to eukaryotic cells and working in both the lab and field. Providing students the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge science using modern instrumentation is an important part of undergraduate training. As such, the flow cytometer will also be used in Wellesley's laboratory courses, providing our students with opportunities to learn about current high-throughput analytical techniques through hands-on, student-directed research projects. The new flow cytometer will enable novel areas of scientific inquiry to be carried out across multiple departments at Wellesley. Researchers will use the cytometer to study a range of topics, including: extracellular vesicle-mediated interaction dynamics; the structure and abundance of microbial populations in lake ecosystems; compartment-specific redox dynamics; protein-protein interactions; mechanisms of anti-microbial peptide interactions with bacterial membranes; and ploidy discrimination studies in populations of invasive grasses. Results from the research performed with this instrumentation will be disseminated in peer-reviewed scientific journal publications and at scientific meetings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.