About the NRCC
The National Resource Center for Cephalopods (NRCC), funded by the National Institutes of Health's, National Center for Research Resources with additional support from the Texas Institute of Oceanography, is located on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, Texas, USA. The NRCC is a scientific program supporting the mission of the UTMB Marine Biomedical Institute's (MBI) Marine Resources and Aquatic Technology Program (MRATP). The MBI is a member institution of the Southern Association of Marine Laboratories (SAML) and the National Association of Marine Laboratories (NAML).
The NRCC is located 50 miles south of Houston with access to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The NRCC offers production systems for the culture of cephalopods, dormitory-style housing for visiting scientists, office space, computing resources, dry and wet laboratories, aquaculture facilities and docking space for research vessels. Our new Harborside Campus resources include a state of the art aquaculture facility in Ewing Hall.
It features the latest in computer automated mariculture facilities with recirculating sea water and has the capacity to maintain more than 400 adult squid at 1 kilogram, and more than 1,000 adult cuttlefish at 1.5 to 2 kilograms.
The NRCC has a 20 year history of providing the biomedical research community with squid, cuttlefish and other cephalopods for research. It is the only facility to date that has been able to culture squids from egg to adulthood for multiple generations. It is able to provide known-age squid, cuttlefishes and octopuses as well as cells, tissues and organ systems to researchers without the trauma of mass harvesting, thus providing excellent research animals while preserving the natural populations of cephalopods in the oceans.
For more information about the vital role of cephalopods in biomedical research, please see our Cephalopod Information Resources page and the home page of The Marine Resource and Aquatic Technology Program under Allied Research Programs. For a list of visiting scientists who have made use of our facilities, please see our Visiting Scientist Support page. For information about setting up a scientific visit at the NRCC please refer to On-site Facility Resources. To consider receiving live animals in your own laboratory, go to Live Animal Resources and for a broad array of information on this animal group go to Cephalopod Information Resources. To learn more about Galveston Island, take a virtual Tour of Galveston Island.