The Hormel Institute, a biomedical research center of the University of Minnesota, was established in 1942 and has a long reputation in producing world class medical research. The Institute's research success has resulted in a second major expansion of its research facilities and includes a new state of the art laboratory building to open in 2016. The Hormel Institute offers its research scientists complete access to state of the art equipment that includes a FACS cell sorter; confocal microscopy; flow cytometry; protein crystallography robotics and defraction system; nano-HPLC-AB SCIEX triple TOF 5600 mass spectrometry; and a Blue Gene/L and 3 racks of Linux GPU supercomputers for computational biology.