Biologists, geologists and engineers will all be bumping into each other in the basement of Hutchison Hall soon, and it couldn't make Patrick Brown happier.

Brown, a pomology professor, and Ram Sah, a spectroscopist, spearheaded the effort to land a $1.2 million grant for the campus's new Center for Elementary Isotopic Mass Spectrometry. Brown anticipates that such mingling of researchers from diverse fields will be just one of the success stories of the new facility, scheduled to open in November.

"This will be the best-equipped facility of its kind in the United States," he said. The multidisciplinary approach of the center, as well as the strength of the faculty involved, impressed the National Science Foundation and were key to obtaining funding."

The center, with its collection of state-of-the art equipment, will allow very precise analysis of inorganic elements and determination of their isotopic composition. Most elements exist in nature in several different forms known as isotopes, varying only in the number of neutrons contained in the nucleus.

Many disciplines in the biological, environmental, geological and engineering sciences require detailed knowledge of the chemical and isotopic compositions of materials that occur naturally or are synthesized in the laboratory.

Research applications for the new center range broadly from environmental to nutritional to engineering studies. A few of the uses will include:

• tracking the movement of soil nutrients through plants;
• determining the origin and source of dust pollution in the Central Valley;
• monitoring and remediating polluted sites, including the San Joaquin Delta;
• determining nutrient levels for ecosystem research;
• replacing radioisotopes currently used in human nutrition studies;
• analyzing elements for basic and industrial chemistry and physics research;
• and developing computer chips and other engineered products that require high-purity materials.

Of special interests in the biological and environmental sciences, for example, are the pathways of nutrient movement in the food web, the uptake and movement of essential nutrients in plants, animals and aquatic organisms, the fate of contaminants in the environment and modeling of watershed dynamics.

And in geology and engineering, knowledge of the abundance of various elements and their isotopic composition is used to establish evolutionary trends, to help determine the patterns of global climate change and to characterize material properties.

"What is common among these diverse applications is the requirement for analytical instrumentation capable of measuring elements and individual isotopes in concentrated and dilute abundance with high precision and accuracy," Brown said.

Sixteen UC Davis researchers from nine departments, 15 graduate programs and three colleges supported the grant proposal for the new center. And Brown estimates several hundred UC Davis faculty members will have use for the new center. The facility also will be made available to researchers at the campus-based U.S. Department of Agriculture's Western Human Nutrition Research Center, at other UC campuses and throughout the nation.

Because existing mass spectrometry equipment on campus is about 20 years old and quite outdated, many UC Davis researchers are currently sending samples as far away as Denmark for analysis,Brown said.