The headquarters of CIBIO-InBIO are located at the exceptional facilities of the Campus of Vairão (Vila do Conde, Porto), and include state-of-the-art ecology and molecular biology laboratories, modern offices and computer rooms, classrooms, cold-rooms, an auditorium for 250 people, meeting rooms, experimental fields and greenhouses, animal facilities for invertebrate and vertebrate species, as well as for marine and freshwater species. Relevant research facilities are also available at the regional poles of Azores (University of Azores), Lisbon (Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage-DGPC) and at Lubango, Angola (ISCED-Huíla).
The Centre has a very strong experimental and analytical component and possesses a dedicated Centre for Molecular Analyses (CTM) which conducts a huge variety of genetic analyses, using conventional and Next-Generation DNA-Sequencing technologies. CTM is equipped with state-of-the-art sample preparation equipment, DNA-extraction robots, multiple types of sequencing machines (e.g. ABI, Illumina), and a considerable number of PCR machines.
CTM main laboratoryThere are laboratories for carrying out non-invasive genetic analyses used to study a variety of endangered species and an ancient DNA facility for extracting DNA from museum samples and from bones or other type of biological remains collected in archaeological sites. A state of the art computational cluster for processing large-scale sequencing data sets is currently being installed.
Non-invasive analyses laboratory
CIBIO-InBIO is the Coordinating institution of the funded E-Infrastructure 'PORBIOTA' which is a Portuguese research infrastructure aiming to collect, store and manage all biodiversity data of Portugal's territory.
PCR laboratory
Diagenode Bioruptor Pico
Illumina HiSeq 1500 equipment -NGS (left) and 3130xl Genetic Analyzer from Applied Biosystems (right)
Illumina MiSeq equipment (NGS)