Administrative Supplements to Recover Losses Due to Hurricane Sandy

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The research progress of our lab was seriously affected by the hurricane Sandy that devastated the northeastern United States, especially New York City. On October 29th 2012, lower Manhattan, more specifically the area to the south of 40th Street suffered from an unexpected major power outage that lasted for a week. During this period, the power to the laboratory was completely shut down. All the fridges and freezers in the laboratory remained off during the power outage due to the lack of a backup generator in the building. A -80°C freezer’s compressor was damaged due to the sudden power outage and the freezer had to be sent out for repair afterwards. The major power outage caused by hurricane Sandy caused severe losses to our laboratory materials. Lysates and cells, including costly cell line stocks, were stored in the -80°C freezer. These valuable materials thawed and melted and were therefore damaged. Some of the lysate samples are very difficult to produce and collect. These samples required large amounts of time, work and expense to manufacture. They were generated from a large number of experimental animals including adult and pubertal mice through several rounds of a 10 hour STA-PUT separation procedure and were stored in the freezer for following immunoprecipitations (IP) and mass-spectrometry identifications. Numerous antibodies were required to confirm those IP experiments, all of which were stored in either a -20°C freezer or 4°C fridge. Consequently these antibodies were also spoiled during the power outage. Additionally, all reagents useful for the SUMO project (such as lysis buffer, media, western blot reagents etc.) were stored in the fridges and freezers and were also ruined. Due to the aforementioned losses caused by “Sandy”, more funds will be needed to replace the reagents, antibodies and personnel time.