Ultra low temperature freezer

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With the renewed fears of an avian influenza outbreak resulting in another human pandemic, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how avian viruses interact with their host, are transmitted and how they might change. Equally important, from the avian point of view, is to develop procedures and vaccines and diagnostic reagents which can help reduce the incidence and spread of viral diseases, including influenza viruses. My research work is on a group of viruses known as avian adenoviruses. Some adenoviruses within this group cause disease in chicken, while other, like the one I work with, are asymptomatic with no effect on chicken health. The virus I chose to work with is called fowl adenovirus 9 (FAdV-9) which does not cause disease but could be an excellent vector to generate vaccines against other avian microbial infectious diseases like influenza. As part of this research, I generate numerous variants of FAdV-9 to test the possibility of using this virus as a vaccine against a variety of infectious diseases. In order to generate these variants, I need to isolate and clone (usually in bacteria) different genes from a variety of microbes before inserting some into my recombinant FAdV-9 vaccine. All of these also require a number of temperature sensitive molecular reagents such as enzymes. Moreover, while testing the various modified FAdV-9 vaccines initially in chickens, I collect many samples (e.g. blood and tissue and fecal samples) to test for the presence of the virus and to study the immune response. It is critical that all these virus variants, cloning intermediates, molecular reagents and animal tissues be stored at very low temperature to preserve their activity for future analysis. In many cases it is important to restudy some material and for that a long term, ultra cold, storage is the best way to preserve the samples. I am therefore requesting funds for an ultra low temperature freezer with a low enough temperature to ensure long term storage and of sufficient size to store the many biological samples I work with and need throughout my research on avian viruses and vaccines.