Our Facilities

ExFAB’s facilities are located at UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, and Cal Poly Pomona. Both the UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside facilities are open to academic, industrial, and governmental researchers from across the nation through two mechanisms: the User Program and the Recharge Program. ExFAB supports the cost of accessing its facilities for approved projects submitted to its User Program; other research projects can access our facilities through payment of an access fee under our Recharge Program.

Through both programs, researchers can either send samples to ExFAB for processing by its technical staff or visit our facilities to directly access select instrumentation after completing any necessary training.

The UC Santa Barbara facility enables automated workflows for studying extreme microbes with a focus on anaerobes. The facility features a first-of-its-kind environmentally controlled chamber that enables fully automated multi-step workflows using advanced liquid handling, imaging, flow cytometry, environmental control, and nucleic acid processing. The chamber is complemented by a suite of mass spectrometry equipment, as well as a fragment analyzer, ultracentrifuge, sonicator and several cell sorters.

The UC Riverside facility focuses on the aerobic environment. It is dedicated to developing automated high-throughput workflows for genomic DNA library prep, DNA extraction, and microbial arraying, colony picking and phenotyping. The Cal Poly Pomona facility supports its faculty research and serves as a training lab for long- read sequencing.