Cross-campus collaboration: Meet CTAF/HTSF core facility director Mary West

Mary West, the director of the Cell and Tissue Analysis Facility and the High Throughput Screening Facility, explains how core facilities increase researchers’ access to equipment and highlights how these facilities play a crucial role in supporting labs’ work during campus COVID-19 restrictions.

Mary West, PhD, is the facilities director of the QB3-Berkeley Cell and Tissue Analysis Facility (CTAF) and High-Throughput Screening Facility (HTSF), two of 32 core facilities on the UC Berkeley campus. The two facilities provide two different sets of instrumentation resources for researchers: “CTAF offers tools to develop cell-based assays,” West notes. “While HTSF allows researchers to miniaturize and optimize those assays, and finally, perform a complex screening experiment under a multitude of conditions, and return to their labs with the data.” While they may be on opposite sides of campus, the two facilities serve complementary research roles that flow together, according to West.

The HTSF is located in the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Services. The CTAF is in Stanley Hall, where most of the QB3 core facilities are located, and is commonly visited by what West calls the “Northeast quad of campus”—i.e., the engineering, chemistry, and physics researchers. While some instrumentation might be available elsewhere on campus, West highlights the convenience of having these facilities nearby, especially for live cell experiments.

“Researchers don’t have to travel across campus to another core facility to use an instrument,” she explains. “Their cells don’t have to suffer in the middle of the summer.”

These facilities are great for researchers who don’t have an instrument they need, or for labs that don’t want to purchase an instrument that may be infrequently used. Additionally, a lab might have the equipment a researcher wants to use, but there is limited time available to use that equipment. “Maybe there’s not enough time slots available for all the researchers who want to use it,” West says. “Core facilities can help alleviate that pressure.”

Having a facility with lots of equipment also opens up the opportunity for it to be used as a testing location for new equipment. “CTAF and HTSF are both great demo sites,” West says. “We bring in potentially interesting equipment for scientists to try out.”

For current equipment, service fees are shared across all instruments in the facility so that payments for a popular instrument can help pay for a less-used one. This system keeps pricing reasonable for small labs, especially as the instruments are billed per hour rather than through memberships. “If you don’t use it, you don’t pay,” West says. These facilities are also available for small startup companies that have a connection to Berkeley, those that might not have the funding to buy all the equipment they need for crucial proof-of-concept experiments necessary to secure investor or government funding.

Automated instruments are the flagships of both core facilities. CTAF offers automated microscopes and an automated flow cytometer; HTSF also has an automation focus. “These are liquid-handing robots,” says West. Typically, in a core facility setting, experienced staff exclusively handle these automation tools within a customer service model. At the HTSF, researchers get hands-on experience and work with staff who provide support. “Researchers can get a feel for using the instruments,” West says. “They’ll have an idea of what it entails— the optimization required, materials costs, processing times, and the amazing amount of data you can capture if you do it right.”

One of the new instruments to the HTSF is the Biotek Multiflo, which helps scale up the validation stage of research. The automation makes dilution series or complex assays easier by decreasing errors from manual pipetting. “It gives better reproducibility,” says West. “We let people know, if they’ve been handling more than five plates at a time, please come get some automation help!”

Collaboration is another core tenet of the CTAF and HTSF. With ten years of experience as a Berkeley facility manager, West is a resource not not only in equipment use, but also in connecting researchers across campus. “Part of QB3’s mission is creating and fostering collaborative research environments. In service of this mission, I help connect scientists to each other.” There is also a high throughput/content screening users group, where researchers from UC Berkeley, UCSF, and other institutions can gather to bounce ideas off of each other and share what’s worked for them for their projects—including the projects run out of the HTSF at UC Berkeley.