Leaf samples provided by Neal Stewart, University of North Carolina at GreensboroWild-type (right) and GFP-expressing (left) canola leaves viewed with the Illumatool LT-9500. Excising bands from a gel on a UV light box can leave improperly shielded scientists looking a little crispy around the ears. Most UV users don't realize that many of the dyes and stains commonly used to visualize nucleic acids and proteins have a bimodal excitation spectrum. While the absorption peak most frequently explo

Preparation of high-quality RNA was once an art mastered by only the most fastidious pairs of RNase-free hands. Trevigen Inc., of Gaithersburg, Md., has put a new spin on mRNA purification with its INSTANT mRNA Capture Disc system. Designed around hole-punch-size membrane discs treated with a proprietary coating that binds polyadenylated RNA, the INSTANT mRNA system purifies high-quality mRNA from cells and tissues in less than one hour. The system's procedure is simple and quick. Lysate f

Gel Documentation and Analysis Systems Gel Documentation and Analysis Systems (continued) Alpha Innotech's FluorChem His name was Herman. The kindly, silver-haired Estonian immigrant ran the department photography shop. Anybody needing to capture an image of a Coomassie or silver-stained protein gel let Herman work his magic with light box, camera, and developing solutions. He started by asking the researcher to carefully position the gel on his light box. Next, he installed the proper filter a

Microplate Washers Part 1 Microplate Washers Part 2 Just like the family dishwasher, microtiter plate washers have taken the drudgery out of doing the dishes. Far removed from showering a microplate with a squirt bottle, microplate washers combine buffer dispensing and aspiration cycles to remove reagents from sample wells, preparing 96-, 384-, and 1,536-well plates for the next step in an assay or procedure. Plate washer manufacturers build manual and automated washer systems. Both types h

Have you ever used one of those low-temperature sample storage blocks that you remove temporarily from the freezer? Ever feel uncomfortable about how well that block maintains its temperature while on the benchtop, despite what the manufacturer claims? Have you silently cursed the puddle that forms under it as that block's frosty coating melts? Torrey Pines Scientific Inc. of Solana Beach, Calif., has redefined laboratory sample temperature control with the recent introduction of its ECHOtherm M

QIAGEN's BioRobot 9604 A tremendous amount of gene sequence data is now available due to the efforts of many independent labs and the Human Genome Project. Armed with this information, scientists are now focusing on gene function and expression studies. In particular, examination of the effects of various experimental conditions on levels of gene expression has become an important discipline for academic and pharmaceutical labs working in molecular diagnostic, drug screening, and lead optimiz

To study the effects of physical forces on cell growth and differentiation, researchers must stretch, strain, compress, shear, pull, or apply pressure to tissue culture cells. Numerous procedures have been created to apply force to cells in vitro. Designed to simulate forces encountered in vivo, such methods include cell wounding by cutting a monolayer and the application of tension or compression by means of hydraulic pressure. Now, with the development of the Bio-Stretch System from ICCT Tec

Date: October 11, 1999Ultracentrifuges Contacts for Ultracentrifuges Products Beckman Coulter's Optima MAX High-Capacity Personal Ultracentrifuge It boggles the mind when you think about it--a few pounds of well-balanced titanium or aluminum spinning steadily along at 1,667 revolutions per second, creating forces that approach one million times the pull of gravity. The ability to generate such speeds and forces through ultracentrifugation has contributed much to our understanding of biological

Who hasn't felt a pang of guilt when an empty tip box bounces off the bottom of a trashcan? All of those discarded pipette tip boxes represent wasted resources. Manually loading tips, on the other hand, wastes other resources such as time and energy, fueling frustrations as yet another handful of tips scatters across the floor. Bellco recently introduced the Tipster II. Billed as the premier automatic pipette tip-loading device, the Tipster loads 576 pipette tips--enough for six boxes--in abou

Table of Carbohydrate Products Model of glycoprotein supplied by Seikagaku America Glycobiology. It has been called the "last frontier of pharmaceutical discovery." Hampered by a lack of economical and convenient tools, however, advances in glycobiology have been largely overshadowed by the rush to exploit PCR and the ready availability and comparative simplicity of the tools and enzymes for molecular biology. But that is changing. By all reports, the field of glycoprotein and carbo

Date: June 7, 1999Precast Gel Table FMC Latitude™ Midigels Analyzing DNA on gels is not what it used to be. In the last two years, several new precast gels for nucleic acid analysis have been introduced to life scientists. Based on some novel and creative ideas, a few of these products have undoubtedly raised more than a few eyebrows. Others have probably generated comments like "It's about time." For example, it takes some adjustment to consider running a dry agarose gel--one that eli

Savant Instruments of Holbrook, N.Y., has recently redesigned the venerable SpeedVac with the release of the next-generation SPD-Series SpeedVac concentrators. The SPD-Series SpeedVac concentrators consist of three compact, benchtop instruments built to dry or concentrate biological and nonbiological samples in a variety of solvents. Savant Instruments' SPD-SpeedVac All three models efficiently evaporate solvents by centrifugal vacuum evaporation. Created through the combination of centrifugal