Working environment & facilities

The Sainsbury Laboratory favours daring, long-term research and has state-of-the-art technologies and support services to enable cutting-edge science.

A view of The Sainsbury Laboratory from the UEA playing fields
A view of The Sainsbury Laboratory from the UEA playing fields

The Sainsbury Laboratory is housed within a single building built in 1989. Our building is physically linked to two of the main John Innes Centre science buildings which makes it easy to interact with our colleagues in JIC. Four large open plan lab spaces spread over two floors house our research groups. Groups share access to large and/or specialist equipment which is housed in ancillary rooms and is maintained by the Laboratory Support team.

Break-out space for relaxing is provided in the form of a large coffee area on our ground floor where we also have a seminar room which is used to host seminars given by TSL staff and regular external speakers.

We have state of the art scientific facilities, enhanced by in-house support services including dedicated, proteomics, bioinformatics, plant transformation, media services, technical and administration teams. These outstanding facilities are available for all PhD students and post-doctoral researchers and enables cutting-edge science.

We have dedicated rooms for microscopy which include two Leica confocal systems (SP5 upright and SP8 inverted with white laser). Our Proteomics facility houses our two main mass spec instruments, a Thermo Fusion Orbitrap and a new Bruker tims-TOF. We also share a Thermo Eclipse system with our colleagues in the John Innes Centre.

Photo of the confocal imaging room at TSL. Room contains two Lweica confocal microscope systems.
Confocal microscopes at The Sainsbury Laboratory

TSL staff and students enjoy the benefits of being located on the Norwich Research Park and have access to facilities such as the John Innes Centre swimming pool, badminton and squash courts, full sized snooker table and pleasant surroundings to enjoy a walk at lunchtime. The nearby Centrum building has a large restaurant which is also open to the public.

Researchers in TSL enjoy access to five support groups who provide technical expertise in the following areas

Photograph showing the MSc study space at TSL

Our MSc study space at TSL