It’s been years in the planning and taken months of packing, unpacking and calling in what feels like every flow cytometry engineer in the UK, but the Francis Crick Institute and its Flow Cytometry Facility are finally up and running.
The building was officially opened last month by Her Majesty the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Andrew and a host of other VIP guests. But we’d already been in the building for weeks getting our equipment back up and running after it was moved from our “legacy” sites in Mill Hill and Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
 |
| Sir Paul Nurse Introduces The Queen to some Crick Scientists photo by, Fiona Hanson |
The move happened in three stages to ensure that we were able to offer a service to users at the new site as soon as they arrived while still having machines on the old sites for those who moved later. This meant we were amoungst the first in and the last out on all three sites. By the time of the last move the old labs, which used to be so busy, were starting to feel eerily deserted, but they also had more bench space than ever before!
 |
| The old Lincoln's Inn Fields Lab and it's last remaining Fortessa |
Inevitably things didn’t go entirely smoothly. That was never likely with a move of this size and complexity and there were delays getting our Containment Level 2 hoods ready, a few things got broken in transit and we discovered some very very small lab coats. But with a lot of work, help from all those engineers and the wonderful Crick staff, most of our equipment is now open for business.
The Crick has been designed to make full use of Science Technology Platforms (STPs) such as ours. Immunology labs and others with the greatest need for Flow Cytometry facilities have been clustered close to us. Anyone having to come from further afield (over 12 floors - the building covers 1,000,000 square feet) can follow designated routes to ensure samples don’t have to be carried through the many informal meeting and breakout areas.
The Crick Flow Facility itself is made up of five rooms. We have a prep lab with our own tissue culture hood, incubator etc. The old labs had very little bench space so we are now much better equipped to process users samples and stain cells to test out new techniques. We then have two analyser rooms. One of those houses our two imaging cytometers, a MacsQuant VVB and a Fortessa X20. The latter will soon be in a hood that will allow us to do Containment Level 2 analysis without the need to fix cells first.
Our second analyser room currently contains six five laser Fortessas, three LSRII’s, a FACSVerse and three computers loaded with a range of analysis software.
Our sorting facility is divided between the Containment Level 2 and Containment Level 1 rooms. In the former, we have an Aria III, an XDP and two Influxes in hoods and in the latter there are two more XDPs plus two Aria Fusions for the non hazardous samples. All of these machines will be operated exclusively by members of the flow cytometry facility. Howevere, we also have an Avalon sorter which gives users the option of doing simpler sorts for themselves at times when the lab isn’t staffed or everyone is booked up on the more complex sorters.
The challenge of bringing together staff and users from two quite different institutions was perhaps almost as great as moving all our instruments. In the months leading up to the physical move we began swapping staff between sites to help all the lab members get used to working together and to introduce ourselves to our new users. The flow cytometry lab now has 12 staff and the Crick is home to around 1250 researchers - so that’s potentially quite a lot of people to train and sort cells for.
 |
| A rare photo of the entire Crick Flow lab staff in one place (L-R) Joana, Bhavik, Graham, Phil, Carl, Kirsty, Damian, Florian, Wayne, Sukhveer, Debi and Derek |
Kirsty
