Priorities helping out the Institute of Biomedical Research

Let’s try to organize our efforts in this matter… Any initiative to help out setting up the Institute of Biomedical Research should be communicated via mail to amigosdeibruganda(at)gmail.com.

Even though it is one of the human inventions that more troubles brings to my phylosophical mind, what we need the most, and it is in addition the easiest thing to move around, is money. Donations will be done via one of the following mechanisms:

• wire transfer to an account in Uganda or Spain. Details via mail.
• on-line fundraising for particular projects that we will explain and advertise as they come. It will most probably be through the http://www.youcaring.com/ site since it is the only one that I have found that doesn’t charge transaction fees. I don’t know you but, to me, making money out of other people’s efforts and charity just doesn’t sound right…

In future posts I will develop some fundraising ideas that I already mentioned in the most popular post of the blog. The pen-recycling squad is already shaping up in Spain and we will soon explain how to join. These campaigns are usually country-specific, so feel free to start something similar wherever you are. All posts concerning donations and fundraising will have the “paticipation” tag so they are easier to find. Don’t forget to take a look to the initial post to see if tehre is anything you can do.

Now, about general use materials. I think we have paper and folders covered for a while with a couple of those efficient women that populate my life. We could use some pens, white board markers and eraser, post-it packs, memory sticks, external hard disks, and a screw-driver and a torch. All these things could be obtained here and sending them overseas would be more expensive than the value they have. Keep them only if I can take them with me somehow, or if they can be sent with a more valuable shipment.

The following will be  a list of priorities, the things in which we would spend the money if we had any. Tese are the same priorities for anything you might be able to find in a lab or warehouse. The golden rule is that you should only ship things that are valuable enough to make the costs of the delivery a worthy investment. DHL seems to be the chosen courier from UK. Not sure about the US but I imagine is the same. ask before sending anything because it is necessary to include a phone number as a contact. Any package should CLEARLY state that it contains donations for the Kampala International University. In the surprising case that you get quite a few things, we shall pool together everything coming from Europe to make one single (more affordable) shipment. The base camp will be Huesca. Castellón and Zaragoza will also be delivery points. Things coming from the States, at the moment, will be handled from San Diego. If this gets bigger, we will see what is more convenient. Do not hesitate to e-mail if you have ANY question (amigosdeibruganda(at)gmail.com. I am going to do a trip to Spain in a few weeks and also in December. I can bring things in my luggage then. I will (most probably) be in San Diego at the end of May, maybe in New York a few weeks later.

So, the list:

• Improvements in the lab
  • Changing the locking system on the door to allow people getting in and out keeping the door closed. We just need to change the lockers for padlocks. We have asked for a budget and will let you know when we get it.
  • Covering the windows with mesh so the lab isn’t taken by termites in every storm and we keep outside other ordinary insects.

• Internet connection for the lab through Orange3G costs us 299000 Ugandan Shillings ($120, 92€, 75 GBP). The DVC is negotiating with Orange-Uganda the connection for the whole campus but even if that arrives, it won’t be free.
• We also need a first shipment of flies from the Blomington collection but I still don’t know the total cost.
• Equipments:
  • micropipettes, urgent! We only have a partial set (thanks, you-know-who),
  • at least one table-top microcentrifuge, even better if we get two of them. Right now we have none and it’s kind of hard to do anything,
  • precision scale (the one we have is a beautiful piece of decoration ranging 1 to 10 grams, and we don’t even have the weights to make it work),
  • vortex,
  • spectrophotometer,
  • refrigerator,
  • and a long wishlist:
    • at least one complete electrophoresis tank (the smaller the better) and two or three gel trays. Right now we have one tank with lid and another one without (e.g. useless) and one single gel tray with two combs,
    • -20ºC freezer,
    • incubators to keep the flies at constant temperature,
    • speedvacuum
    • SDS-PAGE set
    • motorized homogenizer
    • microscopes to work with flie
    • …
• Various Lab Materials:
  • autoclavable bottles, 100, 250 and 500 ml
  • beakers, flasks, calibrated tubes of various volumes
  • Polaroid film for Fotodyne gele-capture system
  • Inoculation loops and Digralsky spreaders
  • calibrated glass pipettes
  • brushes to clean calibrated tubes
  • glass tubes for bacterial growth 
  • racks for 1.5ml tubes 
  • tip boxes 
  • bunsen burners 
  • …
• Consumables:
  • 1.5ml tubes
  • tips (10, 200 y 1000 microlitres)
  • 50ml falcon tubes (of 15ml we are served at the moment)
  • petri plates
  • bottles to grow flies
  • whatman and absorbent paper
  • …
• Reagents and products:
  • agarose ($$$) and agar
  • ethidium bromide
  • ingredients for fly food, LB, PBS, TBE and other popular lab solutions
  • phenol, chlorophorm, sodium acetate, ethanol, isopropanol, TRI-reagent…
  • fenol, cloroformo, acetato sódico, etanol, propanol, TRI-reagent…
  • restriction enzimes, ligase, polymerase… See if one of those lab representatives can send us some samples  
  • …
• Various:
  • water dispenser
  • printer (there might be one available for donation, but I add it just in case)
  • computers with a decent RAM (we have enough of the slow frustration-indecur ones)
  • a copy (digital or analogic) of
    • The Genome of Drosophila melanogaster, Dan L. Lindsley y Georgianna G. Zimm
    • The Development of Drosophila melanogaster, M. Bates y A. Martínez-Arias
    • Fly Pushing: The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics, Ralph J. Greenspan
    • Current Protocols in Molecular Biology
    • and other useful lab manuals (ask me before you do any work in case we have them already)

and I am sure I am leaving something out… THANK YOU!!!

PS: You can now check out the Institute on the website of KIU-Western Campus.