As Syracuse University students moved back to campus last week, a small army of
construction workers, faculty, and staff worked feverishly to ensure that teaching
laboratories and classrooms in SU's new Life Sciences Complex would be ready for
students. The rest of the building's future inhabitants-including all manner of life
forms, from single-celled organisms to faculty researchers-will move in over the next
three months.
The complex will be dedicated on Nov. 7, during a daylong celebration to include a
keynote address by J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in decoding the human genome, and
other events. Celebration details will be forthcoming and available on the Web at
http://thecollege.syr.edu.
The 230,000-square-foot Life Sciences Complex, designed by Ellenzweig Associates of
Cambridge, Mass., is the largest building project in the University's history. The
complex consolidates classroom and laboratory instructional space for biochemistry,
biology and chemistry; for the first time, the entire biology department will be in one
building, along with the chemistry department. The complex has two wings in an L-
shaped configuration. The research wing houses biology research laboratories,
conference rooms and faculty offices. The teaching wing includes biochemistry,
biology and chemistry teaching labs, and lecture halls. Large research greenhouses
perch like jeweled crowns atop the teaching wing.
Moving vast amounts of delicate scientific equipment and living organisms that are
part of ongoing studies to new homes in the Life Sciences Complex will be no easy
feat and will require an enormous amount of coordination and timing so as not to
disrupt sensitive research activities, according to biology professor Larry Wolf, who is
coordinating the move with Department of Biology Chair John Russell. While the
yeast, meal worms and fruit flies will most likely easily tolerate their location change,
some of the larger organisms-such as Arabidopsis plants and African cichlid and
Indian zebrafish-are apt to get stressed out if their moves are not carefully
orchestrated.
The Arabidopsis plants, which associate professor of biology Ramesh Raina describes
as the "lab rat of the plant world," are highly sensitive to environmental conditions
such as temperature, humidity, light and airflow. Before the plants can be moved,
Raina and his laboratory team will need to ensure that conditions in the new plant-
growing rooms and greenhouses are suitable for Arabidopsis. To do that, they will
grow test plants in the new facilities before the experimental plants are moved.
"We use Arabidopsis to understand how plants sense and respond to environmental
stresses, particularly pathogens," Raina says. "At any given time, we are growing
several hundred plants, some of which took us several years and a lot of effort to
create and are precious for our research."
Once the conditions are deemed suitable in the new growing rooms, half of the plants
will be relocated from the Biology Research Laboratory to the Life Sciences Complex.
The remaining plants will be moved after it is determined that the first group has
properly settled in. Even then, several plants will remain in the old building for seed
harvest before all can be moved to the new building.
"Although we are excited about the new facility, we are nervous about ensuring a
smooth transition for our plants to their new home," Raina says.
Moving fish is even more complex than moving plants. Raised by assistant professor
of biology R. Craig Albertson, the cichlids and zebrafish are used to study the genetic
basis of biodiversity. Cichlids, it turns out, are a highly diverse family of fish that
have evolved extremely rapidly over time. In the wild, the colorful fish grow to about
six or eight inches long; in captivity, four inches. Albertson's fish are the result of
more than two years of selective breeding for ongoing genetic mapping experiments.
The environment in which they swim is carefully maintained to replicate an African
lake. Elaborate filtration systems strip Syracuse city water clean of all minerals and
other contaminants. Minerals and salts found in the cichlids' native environment are
added to the purified water before it is pumped into the tanks. About 10 percent of
the tank water is changed daily, refreshing the system in much the same way as a
gentle rainfall refreshes a lake.
The tiny zebrafish live in a separate filtered environment, which is less elaborate than
the cichlids' environment but no less challenging to move. "The two species represent
the dual nature of our research," Albertson says. "We use the zebrafish to understand
how skeletons form and cichlids to learn how skeletons evolve at the molecular level."
Before the move, the fish will be consolidated into half of the tanks in the research lab
and the filtration systems will be turned off. Air hoses will serve as a temporary
aeration system until the fish can be moved to their new home. A commercial
company will move and rebuild the filtration systems and the empty tanks. When
that task is complete, Albertson and his lab team, which includes graduate and
undergraduate students, will scoop the fish into old-fashioned, low-tech buckets and
move them to the new building. The remaining, now empty, tanks will be moved the
following day and the fish will be redistributed accordingly. If all goes well with the
bucket brigade, Albertson expects the physical moving of the fish to take six to eight
hours. The move is scheduled for mid-September, when the weather is still reasonably
warm and the fish are less likely to be shocked by decidedly un-tropical, Syracuse
cold air.
"The move will stress the fish," Albertson says, "however, stress tends to increase
spawning activity, which could be a good thing for our experiments."
