Facilities

The Biospecimen Accessioning and Processing (BAP) Core has facilities at all three Mayo Clinic campuses, including Rochester, Minnesota; Scottsdale and Phoenix in Arizona; and Jacksonville, Florida.

Rochester laboratory space

In Rochester, the BAP Core facility has about 100,000 square feet of dedicated space. This enables all accessioning, processing, storage and technology activities in Minnesota to be consolidated into one central, state-of-the-art, highly automated facility. This centralized facility offers numerous advantages, including better efficiency and uniformity and increased automation and standardization of procedures and processes, all leading to high-quality material for investigators. The goal is to automate as many of the processes as possible, including sample storage.

The facility also offers numerous ways to protect specimens in the face of disaster or power outages, including:

  • Two separate sources of city power, each from a different substation. Each can provide 100% power to the building.
  • Three on-site generators for backup power.
  • Three bulk 13,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tanks to provide liquid nitrogen to the robotic freezers to maintain a temperature of 80 degrees Celsius below zero until power is restored.
  • Three levels of refrigeration redundancy for robotic freezers. Robotic storage units contain 10 chest freezers for a total capacity of about 9 million samples. Each chest freezer has an independent refrigeration system with a primary compressor, a backup compressor and a tertiary liquid nitrogen connection. Each robotic storage unit can evacuate an entire chest freezer into an empty spare chest freezer contained within the system.
  • Key-card controlled access to the laboratory space.

All freezers are on a wireless automated temperature tracking system. Alarm settings are predefined. Laboratory staff members are notified at any time of day or night if a storage unit has reached its upper or lower limit. All freezers and equipment are monitored under a preventive maintenance program by the laboratory staff. The facility maintains an on-site repair shop, and backup freezers are available.

In addition, the facility was constructed to enable expansion space for future growth to support all biorepository laboratory services and storage needs.