by Catherine Shaffer
A well-equipped life sciences laboratory includes a number of basic items that, while not that exciting or glamorous, can make or break an experiment, depending on the choices made. Incubation, refrigeration, photography, and even shakers can make a huge difference in the ease and success of a laboratory process—and affect the quality and reproducibility of your data. This article highlights a few of the ordinary pieces of equipment that can become exciting by making life a lot easier in the laboratory.
CO2 Incubators
When it comes to incubators, there are several common areas of concern that come up repeatedly. These are contamination, stable conditions within the chamber, and management of humidity and condensation.
Contamination can be prevented in a number of different ways. Heat sterilization, UV sterilization, and HEPA filtration are some or the most popular choices for contamination control. Copper linings and fittings can discourage the growth of microbes, as well.
NuAire manufactures both heat- and water-jacketed incubators, with optional decontamination and sterilization systems to clean the interior chamber between uses. NuAire's expertise in biosafety cabinets informed its design of CO2 incubators. As a result, the incubators have much in common with their biosafety cabinet cousins, including a state-of-the-art HEPA filtration system. It filters the air to the same standard as an ISO Class 5 clean room. “A HEPA filter is the surest way to control any potential contaminants that may harm the end-user's samples,” said Kevin Murphy, a NuAire spokesman.
Condensation also increases the risk of microbial growth within the chamber. NuAire's product, by way of its uniform heating and airflow system, is designed to have no condensation within the chamber. NuAire is launching a new line of CO2 incubators this year that will include a control display featuring a touch screen panel, improved user-friendly controls and displays with a focus on ergonomics, as well as more robust data tracking options.
The Galaxy CO2 Incubator from New Brunswick Scientific offers a fanless, direct, convection-based heating system that provides uniform, vibration-free incubation for cell culture. In addition to being a major cause of contamination, the vibration from a fan affects the growth of adherent cells. Fans can also cause uneven heating on different shelves within the incubator.
“The Galaxy Incubator is designed for contamination-free cell culture operation where lab space is a premium. We provide more usable space, on a smaller footprint, than traditional or water-jacketed systems,” said Ted Andrew, product manager for New Brunswick.
Microplate Readers
In today's life science laboratory, everything happens in a microplate, including absorbance assays. Instead of an old-style single cuvette, instruments now scan 96 wells—and sometimes more—simultaneously. The market offers a variety of instruments for this purpose, including UV and visible spectrophotometers and instruments that read luminescence, fluorescence, fluorescence polarization, and light scattering. Some scanners offer more than one detection mode or incorporate additional functions such as incubation or liquid handling.
BMG Labtech's new Spectrostar Nano allows full spectrum analysis at a resolution of 1 nm, which, according to Michael Fejtl, international sales and marketing specialist for BMG, is a benchmark “never before possible on a microplate reader.” The Spectrostar captures a full UV-Visible spectrum from 220 nm to 1000 nm in less than one second per well, and measures sample volumes as low as 2 uL. The instrument includes predefined protocols for common absorbance assays such as ELISA, DNA, RNA, and protein assays.
“High Throughput measurements, faster read times due to full spectrum acquisition, can be used for quick and fast experiments using the cuvette port, but also for HTS, given the microplate formats up to 1536,” said Fejtl.
On the fluorescence side, BMG Labtech´s FLUOstar Omega has won SelectSciences’ Scientists’ Choice Award for the “Best Drug Discovery Product 2010.”
Monochromator-based microplate readers have a flexible wavelength selection system. However, they also have limitations that hinder the performance of some assays, such as fluorescence polarization, and other assays that require a larger excitation or a measurement bandpass.
Filter-based readers don’t have this limitation but are a lot less flexible, since each fluorophore requires a dedicated filter set. They also don’t allow spectral scanning. Combined monochromator and filter-based readers give you the best of both worlds.
The Synergy H1 Multi-Mode Microplate Reader by BioTek Instruments Inc. is a cost-efficient monochromator-based microplate reader with a quadruple grating architecture for robust performance and flexibility. An optional filter-based optical module upgrades Synergy H1 to an advanced Hybrid System and expands its range of applications. A dual-reagent injection system automates inject-and-read assays such as ion channel and flash luminescence assays.
“Most multi-mode readers include either filter-based or monochromator-based optics. With the Synergy H1, researchers now have a choice of filters or monochromators, or both technologies in one compact unit. The value of a combined Hybrid system to the user is that assay choice is now unlimited for current and future assays at a lower cost than separate, dedicated systems, and with no increase in the unit’s footprint,” said Xavier Amouretti, a BioTek spokesman.
Applications include UV-Vis absorbance, top and bottom fluorescence, and luminescence. And when the filter module is added, applications are expanded to include fluorescence polarization, time-resolve fluorescence, fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), and bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET). In the drug discovery and development market, Synergy H1 is suitable for ADME/Tox and medium-throughput screening applications at “a reasonable price point,” according to BioTek.
Gel Documentation Systems
In the past, the laboratory gel documentation system was simply a Polaroid camera that could be used for protein or DNA gels. Although rough quantification was possible with those methods, it certainly wasn't very accurate. Newer gel documentation systems use CCD imaging and are vastly more sophisticated—and they can handle many different types of gels, blots, and plates.
Bio-Rad’s newest imaging system, the Gel Doc EZ, has camera settings that are automatically configured for images that are always in focus. It uses modular imaging trays to define applications, thereby allowing scientists to purchase only the applications they use and upgrade to new applications only when they plan to use them. That way, budget-conscious labs can maximize their financial resources.
The Gel Doc EZ is very compact and is the only system on the market capable of imaging Criterion Stain Free Gel technology. These specially formulated gels stain the protein as part of the imaging step, providing Coomassie-like sensitivity in just 2.5 minutes. For labs running Coomassie, this can save hours every day, without the error that can be introduced in the Coomassie staining and destaining process.
“The Gel Doc EZ is designed to be used in most labs as the workhorse gel documentation instrument for fluorescent and colorimetric gel imaging. It’s perfect for imaging gels generated as part of a protein or nucleic acid experiment,” said Bio-Rad Spokesman Ryan Short.
The market offers a number of other interesting new gel documentation instruments. The Syngene G Box is another versatile system that serves an extended range of applications from fluorescence imaging of DNA gels to colorimetric imaging. UVP has imaging devices for 1D, 2D, in vivo, chemiluminescence, fluorescence, colony counting, and colorimetric imaging. Alpha Innotech (now a part of Cell Biosciences) offers gel documentation systems for fluorescent and colorimetric applications for budgets and needs ranging from economical to high performance.
(Editors note: Please watch later this month for our in-depth article on gel documentation systems.)
Careful attention to general lab equipment like CO2 incubators, microplate readers, and gel documentation systems can pay off in the form of better data and more efficient use of time. Although many of these devices are not replaced until the old one fails, improved features and functions make the new models well worth considering, even if it seems like your Old Reliable is still working fine.