The primary Garner Laboratories are located on the second floor of the Hammon Research Building (NA2), as part of The McDermott Center for Human Genetics on the north campus of The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.  The laboratories include computational biology/bioinformatics offices and server rooms, wet-lab space, optics labs, machine shop of approximately 5,500 square feet.  The lab also has shared core space.

As part of The Center for Biomedical Inventions (CBI), Dr. Garner's team also conducts collaborative, project oriented research within the CBI's space (approximately 12,000 square feet) in the Seay Building (NC).  

Computer Resources in the Lab [status]

The group's computing facility currently has approximately 150 computers, with several multi-processor machines (including SPARC, PA-RISC, and Intel processors). The main servers for the lab are:  A Hewlett-Packard HP9000/898 server with four 200 MHz 64-bit processors, 4GB of RAM and over 150GB of disk space, a Hewlett-Packard HP9000/800 server with four 440 MHz 64-bit processors, 4GB of RAM and over 110GB of disk space, a SUNFire V880 server with eight  800 Mz 64-bit processors with 16GB of RAM and 500GB of disk space (running Oracle).  We also have a VA Linux 32 CPU Linux cluster, 6 Dell PowerEdge 4600 servers, 4 Dell 2650 servers, several multi-terrabyte RAID 5 storage arrays (with a total of over 10 terrabytes of on-line storage), 5 Cobalt web servers, several multiprocessor Linux servers, and other Microsoft windows based servers.   The servers and storage systems are linked via fiber to a central switch, and all user computers are connected to the switch by high speed Ethernet cable.  The computers are directly connected to the university backbone via fiber. Multiple tape backup systems are employed to maintain on-site and off-site copies of all data and software.  These servers are used to maintain updated local copies of the MedLine, Genbank, PDB, SWISS-PROT and PIR databases, to index the databases for fast entry retrieval, and to serve all of our in-house computational requirements.All machines run a variety of sequence analysis tools, like NCBI and WU BLAST, along with tools developed in the lab for large-scale sequence analysis and annotation, including prediction of exons, cDNA and peptide sequences, CpG islands, polymorphic markers, and potential DNA structures. Our integrated sequence analysis, annotation and visualization packages are available for public use.  Dr. Garner has a Sony Vaio portable PC in and a Mac G3, PowerPC 9600 and a DLP computer projector in his office.   

Wet-bench and Instrumentation Development Labs 

For wet lab biology to pursue our computational findings, Skip's labs are outfitted with 2 Beckman capillary sequencers, several Beckman 2000 pipetting robots, 8 - 96 well thermal cyclers, gradient thermal cyclers, Beckman Gold HPLC, Beckman spectrum spectrophotometers, Hitachi fluorometer, epi-fluorescent microscopes, cyto-spin, atomic force microscope, 2 oligo synthesizers (Beckman 8 column and BioAutomation MerMade 192 column), Stratagene Eagle Eye gel documentation system, plate and micro centrifuges, scales, vacuum ovens, freezers and refrigerators.  The laboratory also contains an Axon Genepix Personal 4100A 2 color, 5 micron array scanner, an Applied Precision 4 color, 1.8 micron high precision microarray scanner, in addition to his hyperspectral imaging 0.2 micron microscope and array scanner.   
 

For instrumentation development, the lab has a fully functional machine, optics and electronics shop with DRO milling machines, saws, drill presses, lathe, and a variety of small machine tools.  There are several dark rooms with optical benches for the construction of digital light projection (DLP) systems for light-directed array synthesis (two DOC oligonucleotide array synthesizers and one DOC peptoid array synthesizer), tissue engineering, immune/cancer cell DLP driven spectral illumination synthesizer, and two holographic TV prototype systems.