My lab recently purchased the Snap i.d. rapid Western blotting system from Millipore, and it has quickly become my favorite piece of lab equipment. The standard Western blotting procedure involves blocking for thirty minutes or more, incubating in primary antibody for at least an hour, and incubating in secondary antibody for an additional hour, interspersed with multiple wash [...]

Microcentrifuges are pretty much the epitome of efficiency, but I have a couple of suggestions that may make using this instrument even easier. Divide by Three Not only is the number of tubes a microcentrifuge can hold divisible by two, but almost always by three as well. How does this help you? If you have [...]

If a random sampling of my hallway is any indication, then half of you don’t think too much of using a ultracentrifuge, while the other half of you are scared to death of it. I think the best approach is right in between these two perspectives: have a healthy respect for the ultra. Here are [...]

While almost all of you are probably familiar with the power of eBay to bring you everything from concert tickets to electronics to your very own Batmobile, you may not have realized that the world’s largest garage sale also has quite a collection of laboratory equipment. I’ve been turning to this source for equipment for [...]

I recently visited a lab that had a salad spinner on their lab bench and at first I wondered if they were putting together a salad lunch there but when I took a peek I got a nice surprise. It turns out that the salad spinner was actually a bench top, “minifuge” version of a [...]

While almost every lab has a small toolbox with some screwdrivers, pliers, and such, here are some tools that may not have obvious utility at the bench, but could make your life easier. A Butane Torch If your OCD is as bad as mine, then watching a bubble flow out of the flask onto the [...]

RPM and RCF are two units that can be used to describe the speed of a centrifuge. Although they may look similar, they are oh-so-different and confusing them has resulted a disastrous end to many an experiment. So let’s set it out in black and white to make sure you don’t succumb to the same [...]

Sometimes a new product comes along and you just know that it is going to make your life easier. The SNAP i.d. protein detection system from Millipore falls into that category. In a nutshell, SNAP i.d. is a nifty little gadget that fits in to the immunoblotting protocol after the membrane transfer step. There it [...]

Are you tired of having to clean dingy, moldy waterbaths? Or tired of babysitting the heat block to make sure the temperature stayed where you set it? Well there is a new solution to this problem. I just recently discovered something called Bath Armor by a company called Lab Armor. I was walking by my [...]

You probably use and rely them more than any other tool in the lab, but just how accurate are your pipettes?