Still Spinning After All These Years: A Profile of the Ultracentrifuge

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

Written byMichael Brush

| 11 min read

Save for Later

Listen with Speechify

0:00

11:00

Date: October 11, 1999

Ultracentrifuges

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 sciences and has made ultracentrifugation a most basic and essential separation technique.

While the physics of centrifugation never change, the machines and rotors that exploit those physical laws continue to evolve. The result is a growing collection of instruments for applying ultracentrifugation in new and exciting ways. In this profile, LabConsumer peeks inside the ultracentrifuge and the two companies that supply them, Beckman Coulter and Kendro Laboratory Products.

Many will remember when most plasmid preparations were performed by banding plasmid DNA in ...

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of

Receive full access to digital editions of The Scientist, as well as TS Digest, feature stories, more than 35 years of archives, and much more!

Join for free today

Already a member? Login Here