The Center for Virus Research (CVR)
The University of California at Irvine
3221 McGaugh Hall
Irvine, CA 92697-3906
Phone: 949.824.9314
Fax: 949.824.9437
Services:
Advanced Technology & Resources
The Center for Virus Research
Directed by Dr. Luis P. Villarreal
Oversight committee chaired by Dr. Bert Semler.
Established in July, 2000 as an Organized Research Unit
within the University of California, Irvine.
The CVR Recharge Unit
A recharge is the assessment and collection of a charge by one University department/unit/activity/project for goods or services, furnished to another University department/unit/activity/project. A recharge transaction is appropriate when the furnishing department has incurred expense to make available a product or service which is sold to customer departments for an established price, or at a price based on an established standard pricing method.
The recharge unit associated with the Center for Virus Research is:
Proteomics Mass Spectrometry Facility
Director: Dr. Paul D. Gershon
Other sister facilities:
UCI DNA Core Automated DNA Sequencing Facility
Director: Dr. Robert K. Moyzis
UCI DNA & Protein MicroArray Facility
Director: Dr. Suzanne SandmeyerUCI Computational Biology Research (CBR)
Directors: Dr. G. Wesley Hatfield and Dr. Rick Lathrop
Many research programs at UCI and around the world would be advanced by the ability to produce a synthetic gene rapidly that encodes a protein of interest and is optimized for desirable sequence properties, such as optimal translation kinetics for folding and expression in a chosen target organism. However, since most genes are hundreds to thousands of nucleotides long and it is not possible accurately to synthesize DNA molecules longer than fifty to eighty nucleotides, the rapid synthesis of tailored genes has not been possible. Now, Rick Lathrop of the UCI School of Information and Computer Science, and Wes Hatfield of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in the UCI College of Medicine, have developed and secured UC patent protection on methods to accomplish this very task. This method involves the computational optimization of DNA sequences to allow the correct self-assembly of many overlapping short synthetic DNA oligonucleotides into a complete gene of any desired nucleic acid or amino acid sequence. More specifically, scores of short overlapping synthetic nucleotides, each around fifty nucleotides long, are designed so that complementary, overlapping, regions on alternating strands will hybridize with great efficiency at a high temperature that precludes all nonproductive hybridization events. The thermal stability of these self-assembled genes allows them to be hybridized into any plasmid expression vector and transformed into cells, or used directly as DNA templates to produce proteins in coupled in vitro transcription-translation systems. Since this method is rapid (no more than a few hours) and demands no more than mixing, heating, and cooling, computationally designed oligonucleotides in solution with no purification steps, it is imminently suited for automation for such applications as rapidly producing the entire proteomes or genomes of organisms.Bioinformatics (in silico)
Director: Dr. Pierre BaldiFacilities
BSL3 facility - (HIV)
Director: Dr. David Camerini
Library Display Laboratory
Director: Dr. Greg Weiss