Overview
Lead by Dr. Judy Westrick, the Facility Core (FC) is the primary analytic support unit for the Great Lakes Center for Fresh Waters and Human Health. The FC validates, develops, and implements new and standard methodologies to provide cyanotoxin and secondary metabolite concentrations for the cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Bloom (cHAB) monitoring, mitigation, water quality, aerosol modeling, and to evaluate their impacts on human and ecosystem health. The FC assures accurate, sensitive, and timely analysis for the Great Lakes Center for Fresh Waters and Human Health.
The FC is divided into three subcores:
Nutrient Analysis Sub-core
Analyzes samples for
- Dissolved reactive P
- Nitrate
- Nitrite
- Ammonia/ammonium
- Silicate
- Urea-N
- Total P
- Total N
Cyanotoxin Analysis Sub-core
Analyzes samples for
- Microcystins
- Anatoxins
- Cylindrospermopsins
- Paralytic shellfish toxins (PSTs)
Using a combination of
- LC-MS
- HPLC-FD
- ELISA techniques
DNA Sequencing & Data Synthesis Sub-core
Development of versatile and high throughput approaches to identify natural products from a variety of secondary metabolite gene clusters
Integration of novel technologies in high throughput metagenomics and bioinformatics
Maintains the Great Lakes Atlas for Multi-omics Research (GLAMR)
