The Duncan water bath thermal cycler consists of 3 water baths; the temperature of each can be set individually. A mechanical arm moves a basket containing your plates from one bath to the other. A timer determines how long the plates will stay submerged. When the programmed time has passed, the arm will move the basket to the next water bath and the timer starts again. This will continue until the program has finished and the arm will return to its home position.
The software is very easy to use. You start with adding a line to the program to set the temperature of the three water baths. Then you add a line setting the time for how long the basket needs to be submerged in each water bath. You end this line by putting in the number of times the line must be repeated.
The concept of thermal water bath cyclers is not new, but the big advantage of this machine is that you can do more then one hundred 384-well plates in one run. And because this machine does not have a ramp time, like conventional thermocyclers, the programs run much faster then your conventional thermocyclers.
There are some downsides of the machine as well. One of them is that the drawers that fill the basket are only available for 384 and 1536 plates, so no 96-well plates. If you would like to use 96-well plates, you have to order that drawer separately. One other thing is that each drawer can only contain one type of plate. So as you can only fit 3 drawers into the basket, the combinations you can make are limited, but this is not a major problem.
Our lab is not currently using the machine at its maximum capacity, but we have run the machine for more then a year now. In that time, we have only had one small problem with it: one of the sensors was out of alignment. It was fixed be somebody with average technical skills in 15 minutes. As Kbiosystems has no technical support in the Netherlands, they are very willing to have non-Kbio personnel working on their machines if there is a problem.
Overall, this is a very nice machine for a high throughput lab that is currently using separate thermocyclers to run samples. The machine is not cheap, but far cheaper than buying a large number of thermocyclers to get the same capacity. In addition, the Duncan offers with easy scale-ability from 384 to 1536, which to my knowledge, is not possible with traditional thermocyclers. So a good investment if your throughput will be growing in the future.
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Edwin van Zon, BSc.
Technical Molecular Engineer
Moleculaire Biology Implementation
Rijk Zwaan B.V.
Netherlands
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