A Visit to Bio-Rad

Well, yesterday I went to Bio-Rad (www.bio-rad.com) to check out a new piece of equipment we are thinking of purchasing for the molecular lab. The equipment includes an automated RNA/protein analyzer (Experion) as well as a real-time PCR. The Experion RNA analyzer is very impressive. Very easy to use, no toxic chemicals to employ, and it produces rapid, quality results. The one downside is that the system is fairly expensive, and the sample cartridges are disposable and expensive! Well, what can you do? The system is a real advance over acrylamide electrophoresis. The real-time PCR is also expensive, but less so than other similar systems because they have a "mini" system (MiniOpticon) that handles only 48 (instead of 96) samples. From talking to the people at Bio-Rad, it seems like they are working on developing a chip compatible with the Experion system that will be used for DNA analysis. That would be a great advantage.

Good news about one of my papers. The proofs are definately finished, and the manuscript is to be published next month in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Check it out:

Green, S.J. and Minz, D. 2005. Suicide polymerase endonuclease restriction, a novel technique for enhancing PCR amplification of minor DNA templates. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 71(8):4721-4727.

Anyway, still not much lab work being done. I've been trying to tie up all the loose ends before heading to Mass., and also to finish as much of the proposal as I possible can. Details about the MBL course to come.