FACILITIES

The three-story laboratory building was constructed of steel and concrete in 1971 with funds from a one-million-dollar, NSF facilities grant augmented by funds from the State of Hawai`i. Total floor space in the Laboratory is 17,400 square feet, including more than 12,000 square feet devoted to offices and laboratories for 4 full-time faculty members and their research teams, as well as laboratories for visiting investigators.

KML is equipped with an excellent running seawater system drawing water directly from the open ocean about 1,000 ft off shore. The system operates with 2 intake pipes and pumps to ensure a constant flow of fresh seawater to four 3,000-gallon circular tanks and over 100 smaller sea tables. A back-up seawater system draws water from protected waters in a channel adjacent to the lab. These seawater facilities are used heavily by resident scientists, visitors, and other faculty and staff from the University of Hawai`i’s main campus. The Laboratory maintains a well equipped 16 ft. Boston Whaler skiff for collecting purposes. The collecting staff is knowledgeable about and skilled at obtaining local marine organisms.

KML has a back-up electrical generator, and a recently installed system for distributing reverse-osmosis-purified water to the laboratories. On the first floor are office space for administrative and research personnel, a machine shop, a walk-in cold room and freezer, a small lunchroom, seawater tanks, a one-room apartment for a live-in caretaker (graduate student), an autoclave and dishwasher room, and three laboratories occupied by the research group headed by Dr. Martindale. The second floor houses a library-conference room, a common-use equipment room, two darkrooms, and a cold room, as well as laboratory and office space for the research groups of Drs. Hadfield and Richmond. A visitor laboratory on the second floor is frequently occupied by scientists from outside the University of Hawai`i. All of the large laboratories on the second floor have "seawater lanais," each with 10 - 12 tanks for the maintenance of animals in running seawater. The third floor is occupied by the office and laboratory of Dr. Seaver, plus additional office and lab space for visitors. This floor also has a cold room, a supplies/storage room, and a programmable photic cycle room. A suite of rooms dedicated to microscopic imaging houses microscopes for polarizing-, phase-contrast, fluorescence and photo microscopy, and attendant video and image analysis systems, and microtomes for paraffin, plastic and frozen sections. A sterile (laminar-flow) hood is also included in this suite for conduct of tissue-culture work close to the microscopes.

One room in this suite is dedicated to the Zeiss laser-scanning confocal microscope, purchased in 1998. A second computer is equipped with Zeiss soft- and hardware for analyzing confocal images away from the confocal microscope itself. Both computers are networked to computers in individual research laboratories for image transfer and analyses.

The Kewalo Marine Laboratory is equipped with much of the major equipment needed for modern cell and molecular biology. Some of the instruments available for use by residents and visitors are ultra-, high speed, refrigerated, and micro- centrifuges; seven - 80 degree C freezers; UV/visible spectrophotometers; HPLC systems; PCR thermal cyclers; and tissue culture and bacterial incubators. The Laboratory houses an extensive selection of equipment for protein and nucleic acid electrophoresis (including sequencing), a digitizing gel reader, and an automated X-ray film developer.