Facilities in Hatherly

The Hatherly laboratories are situated along the Prince of Wales Road, overlooking the city of Exeter. The magnificent old building houses modern seminar rooms and a lecture theatre equipped with a PC-data projector for video and computer use in lectures.

Computing facilities

The computer suite has a large cluster of 20 Windows-based PCs for undergraduate students, with dedicated printing and scanning facilities available within the suite. We also have a cluster of 18 state-of-the-art Linux-based PCs used to support all aspects of Masters programme computational teaching, eg MSc Biotechnology and Enterprise. Our cluster of 10 Apple Mac computers is used primarily for sequence analysis and structural biology, as part of the MSc Bioinformatics and MSc Medical Informatics programmes. The latter two programmes are supported by full printing/colour printing and scanning facilities, based in a dedicated MSc Informatics teaching lab.

Laboratories

The teaching and research labs were recently refurbished as part of the University's commitment to quality. The School's laboratories are equipped with all the best available instruments for observational, experimental and numerical aspects of biology. These extend through the whole range of biochemical, molecular, physiological and electronic apparatus, to microcomputers and electron microscopes. Hatherly also houses a general purpose multiuser lab which contains full molecular darkroom facilities and is accredited for radioactive work when required.

The study of whole organisms is supported by facilities such as greenhouses, freshwater and marine aquaria, and a range of constant temperature and growth rooms. The Insect CT room is a self-contained room dedicated to rearing insects. It runs at a constant temperature of 25°C and is readily conformable to Defra/Home Office requirements for working with exotic species, as necessary.

Hatherly also houses part of the School's sequencing facility, based around the Beckman CEQ8000 automated sequencer. This machine forms the core of much of the molecular ecology and population genetic work being undertaken in the School and is used extensively by the research groups of Professor Tyler, Dr Stevens and Dr Mathews.