By Shamona McClary

Kannapolis Citizen

Dressed in his signature pin-striped suit, billionaire David Murdock and other dignitaries involved with the N.C. Research Campus broke ground on the Core Labortory last Thursday.

A crowd of several hundred made its way into the what used to be Town Lake to get details on the campus 311,000-square-foot centerpiece.

The building will be used as a recruiting tool and house several facilities: an 80,000 square-foot laboratory, a virarium, a genomics facility and rentable labs and office suites for biotech companies and researchers. A vararium is an enclosure for keeping living animals and plants under natural conditions for observation or research.

It will also contain the state's only 900 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer machine for analyzing and dissecting molecules as well as other equipment for extremely minute molecular analysis, electron microscopes and computers.

Contact Shamona McClary at 704-932-3336 or smcclary@salisburypost.com.