IINS

Cell Biology Facility

The cell biology facility has been created in 2010, by engineers from teams of Daniel Choquet, Laurent Groc and Olivier Thoumine. They were facing the increasing need of primary cell cultures and decided to mutualize their efforts to win time and money. In 2012, supported by the Labex BRAIN funds, we decided to hire a technician to be able to provide cells also for teams who doesn’t have the expertise but also outside of IINS. Year after year, the facility has been able to expand its fields of expertise proposing other cellular models cf « Proposed cellular models ».

Then we had the capacity to take in charge maxi-preparation of plasmids and now we are also able to propose creation of plasmids on demand cf « Plasmid creation and production ».

Then comes the integration of probes generation and functionalization activity to our set of skills. Since a while, we have the expertise of molecular tools development in Daniel Choquet’s team trough Matthieu Sainlos. The facility therefore hired an engineer to produce the tools MS developed for imaging purposes to benefit the whole institute as well as outside cf « Probes for imaging ».

More recently, the facility has evolved proposing to mutualize orders of viruses for the whole institute. To avoid teams to buy identical viruses in multiple copies, she organizes the sharing of common viruses cf « Mutualized viruses ».

On top of that the facility has 2 other roles: the management of cell culture rooms representing 300m² and a training missions that are both described below in the « Expertize » tab.

After 10 years, we are able to produce 6 different cell culture models, plasmids, probes functionalized and manage a virus database always relying on IINS team’s expertise. Now the facility is involving 26 people of 6 different teams and a part of shared services. We are producing tools and organizing the lab life of 10 of the 14 teams which compose the IINS, meaning more than 70 people. We are proposing our services for the Bordeaux Neurocampus community either, for example: the Bordeaux Imaging Center, the Bordeaux School of Neuroscience. And we provide tools or help to public labs like CENBG studying chemistry and onco-immunology research.

Coming soon, our new activity: hIPS productions !

If you want to learn more about the facility, you can watch that movie :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV5SHnEtKfg

If you need more details you can contact: Natacha RETAILLEAU at natacha.retailleau@u-bordeaux.fr by phone (+33)5 33 51 47 33.

If you use the facility and you want to thank us in your papers, please use that sentence: We thank the IINS Cell Biology Facility used in this study, supported by the GPR BRAIN_2030, especially (----specific facility’s technical staff-----) and (----specific team’s technical staff-----), for cell culture and molecular tool productions.