The GeneGenius Imaging System from Syngene is designed for the detection and documentation of nucleic acids and proteins in gels. The system consists of a dark room, a UV transilluminator and a PC with a thermal printer. The darkroom is equipped with a CCD camera with a motor-operated zoom lens. The system also comes with the “one button” GeneTool analysis software that allows for the analysis of gels, arrays and colony plates. This GeneTool software allows users to count colonies on a plate and all data can be transferred into any type of spreadsheet program. The GeneGenius has a number of automatic functions: gel type detection, presentation of the gel image as a histogram and the creation of a table with the lanes numerically marked.
The GeneGenius is a very compact device thanks to the installation of the camera inside the darkroom cabinet. This, combined with the fact that the door to access the darkroom cabinet slides up, means that it does not take up much precious bench space. The door is fully interlocked which prevents accidental UV exposure. This latter feature is, in my opinion, especially important since in the past (with other devices) we have had people in our lab accidentally exposing themselves to UV simply because they forgot that the transilluminator was on.
The software package that comes with the device, GeneTools, is extremely versatile when it comes to image analysis. We have found the automatic tracking of lanes and bands, regardless of distortion or smiling effects that occurred during the separation, to be especially useful. We all know how often this can happen due to sub-optimally prepared gels or from running the gel too fast. Another fascinating feature of this program is the automated band matching function, which allows you to determine whether a selected band matches any other band on the gel. This is especially useful for large gels - in our case, we run out PCR products that were amplified in a 384-well plate format. This feature truly speeds up the gel analysis thus increasing our daily throughput.
One feature that should be modified is the width of the cabinet door. Because it is fairly narrow, it can occasionally be difficult to place large gels in the proper position in the cabinet. We have had some gels break while trying to re-position them on the transilluminator.
I can truly recommend the GeneGenius as a robust and cost-effective solution for gel documentation in any lab. And because it can be used for a variety of applications, this device is attractive for labs doing molecular biology research. The sophisticated software allows in-depth analysis of the results as well as a comparison of many separations simultaneously.
Michal Janitz, M.D.
Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics
Berlin, Germany