Department of Psychiatry
BMRI Labs - Molecular laboratory
Head of lab: Prof Sian Hemmings (smjh@sun.ac.za)
Lab manager: Ms Kayleigh Filton (kjfilton@sun.ac.za)
The new Psychiatry Laboratory is a Biosafety Level II laboratory on the 2nd floor of the BMRI South Building. This state-of-the-art laboratory comprises the Molecular Laboratory and a Microbiome Laboratory.
The Molecular laboratory is equipped for routine human genomic nucleic acid extraction from several biological sources, including whole blood, saliva, and dried blood spots. The Microbiome laboratory is equipped for bacterial nucleic acid extractions and preparations.
The laboratory boasts a Class 2 Biosafety Cabinet, a Hamilton Starlet for automated liquid handling, sample normalization and DNA extraction, Qubit-4 and Nanodrop machines for quantification of nucleic acids, and agarose gel preparation and viewing equipment. We also possess a QuantStudio™ 6 Flex 384-well Real-Time PCR System, allowing us to perform medium-to-high throughput gene expression, genetic variation, gene regulation, or protein expression experiments.
