This instrument is designed for screening large numbers of samples in a single run. It’s a very compactly designed instrument. Power to the Gel System 96 unit is supplied by an external DC voltage power supply; any power supply can be attached to it. The power cords are attached to the vapor cover; this cover also acts as safety lid. The gel tray is green which makes it easier to visualize the wells while loading samples. The gel tray is UV transparent and has a fluorescently numbered grid, which automatically shows up in the photos or CCD images you make of the gel (i.e. you do not have to number gel lanes by hand on your photos any more, thus, the chance of misnumbering gel lanes is eliminated). The numbering system is exactly the default pattern expected by HELMBERG-SCORE™ Software.
The gel combs are made of aluminum and not plastic (i.e. they are durable and the teeth will not bend). When using aluminum gel combs, the gel will begin to solidify first around the teeth of the comb as aluminum is an excellent conductor of heat, giving rise to well defined, crisp gel slots. The teeth of the gel combs are spaced to allow loading of the gel with conventional 8 channel pipettes. The teeth of the combs are also wedge-shaped; this makes it far easier to load the gel, especially if you are loading with an 8 channel pipette. It is quite difficult to load a gel made with conventional gel comb teeth with a multi-channel pipette as it is difficult to steer all the pipette tips into the narrow gel slots. With our gel comb, this is easy. The gel comb teeth are 3 mm thick at the top and taper down to 0.6 mm at the tip. The density of the liquid containing the PCR products that we load onto the gels is greater than that of the surrounding buffer so the PCR products will sink to the bottom of the gel slot. 0.6 mm is less than the standard 0.8 mm, (i.e. we get sharper bands).The wells formed can accommodate up to 10 ul of sample easily. The separation distance for each row is 25 mm, which is adequate for fragments between 50 and 1000 base pairs. The bottom row has a longer running distance in order to avoid depleting Ethidium bromide from the lower part of your gel. (Therefore, you do not need to have Ethidium bromide in your gel buffer only in the gel.)
We are widely using this instrument for HLA molecular typing. The kit we use comes with 96 wells (one sample corresponds to 96 pcr reactions).The UV-transparent tray and fluorescent, numbered grid facilitate accurate analysis of all samples. Because multichannel pipetting is possible with this unit, it also saves lot of time. The unique, compact design of the instrument allows for minimal use of agarose and buffer. The combs are of very good quality; they can be easily removed (i.e. without bending or disturbing the gel). This unit is not suitable if you have a small number of samples to process. I would suggest this apparatus for those labs which have to process very large number of samples in a short time.