FURMAN BIOLOGY

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Biology Facilities

Furman's Biology facilities are housed in the first floor and the basement of the Townes Science Center. All of our offices, classrooms, and laboratories are new or completely renovated as of Fall 2008. In addition to labs for individual courses and faculty members, the complex includes a vivarium suite, a room for fluorescence microscopy, a herbarium, two zoological collections rooms, a student research project room, a walk-in cold room, a room housing environmental control chambers, a room designed for housing fish and other aquatic organisms, a radioisotope laboratory, and a computer lab. The Science Library is conveniently located adjacent to the Biology Department's rooms. Greenhouse facilities will be constructed soon. To see plans for the Townes Science Center, click HERE.

Major laboratory equipment includes a liquid scillintation counter, an ultracentrifuge, high speed refrigerated centrifuges, a high-performance liquid chromatography unit with diode-array detector (see photo above), a luminescence spectrometer, a benchtop fluorometer, UV-vis spectrophotometers and a number of less sensitive spectrophotometers, a gas chromatograph, an atomic absorbance spectrometer, a video densitometer, a cell sorter/flow cytometer, PCR thermal cyclers, a real-time PCR system, a manual DNA sequencing apparatus, ancillary equipment for molecular biology, many electrophoresis units, an electrophoresis documentation/analysis unit, a bioinformatics web and file server with 1.2 terabytes of storage and 2 gigabytes of RAM, a high-performance parallel computer cluster using two Apple X-serve computers, an electroporator, an image analyzer, an ultracold freezer, a CO₂ incubator, two heating/cooling incubators for culture of chick embryos and other temperature-sensitive organisms, constant temperature baths, a BIOLOG microbial identification system, a radiometer-photometer, vapor pressure osmometers, phase and fluorescence microscopes, lab and field pH meters, several ultrapure water production units, a cryotome, microtomes, two autoclaves, and a number of fume hoods and laminar flow hoods. We share a scanning electron microscope with the other departments in the Townes Center. Our physiology teaching lab is equipped with a number of networked Macintosh computers, with which physiological experiments can be monitored or simulated.

Off-campus field studies are supported by complete camping supplies, portable monitoring devices, and a 15-passenger van with customized trailer. On the Furman campus, the department utilizes many acres of forest, lakes, and fields. A small pond, shown below, is also used.   Within a half-hour's drive is a research site of 1500 acres, Furman Forest. This semi-mountainous site is co-owned by The Nature Conservancy and the Tryon and Landrum water districts. Furman faculty and students have exclusive rights to research within the Forest.
 

The Furman University Zoological Collections are good study collections of both invertebrates and vertebrates. The insect collection is especially rich in butterfly and moth specimens. A checklist of Greenville County moths in our collection can be seen by clicking HERE and photos of many of these specimens can be viewed by clicking HERE.

The Ives Herbarium houses over 20,000 catalogued plant specimens, with the American Southeast being especially well-represented.  

The Department subscribes to many journals housed either in the Townes Center science library or the University's Library. All Furman-networked computers provide access to computerized search facilities to find journal articles in abstract form.  We subscribe to Cambridge Scientific Abstracts databases and to Scopus. We have on-demand ordering of reprints (abstracts and/or full-text) from journals and can obtain books from any academic library in South Carolina within a time period of 3 days.  The entire Townes Science Center is a equipped for wireless computer access to the Internet.

Since Furman is an undergraduate institution, every facility and item of equipment described above is accessible to our undergraduate students. Indeed, a biology major student must learn how to operate much of the lab equipment described above, as part of course requirements.