How to Build a Plate Centrifuge for $25
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 benchtop, “minifuge” version of a plate centrifuge.
What a great idea I thought. A cheap, quick-to-build plate centrifuge that also worked pretty well for a quick spin just before PCR. So, we tried to build one in my lab and we loved it so much that we now have one sitting near almost EVERY PCR plate instrument, and have even gifted a couple to others!
Want to know how to build a plate centrifuge for your lab? It’s simple, here is how…
You will need:
1. A salad spinner – We use the Zyliss brand pull-cord salad spinner.
2. Multi-purpose cable ties found at any hardware store.
3. 96-well plate inserts – We use the ones from ABI
Gathering the components is as complicated as it gets! All you need to do now is use those cable ties to secure the 96-well plate inserts to the inner bowl of the spinner as shown above. Then start using the new mini-plate-fuge!
For more tips, tricks, and hacks for getting your experiments done, check out the Bitesize Bio DIY in the Lab Hub.
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I was surfing the web for old pBR322 sequencig primers, and look what I found! A 1988 article on Focus describing the salad centrifuge!
Here it is (on page 15):
https://www.invitrogen.com/etc/medialib/en/filelibrary/pdf/focus.Par.76092.File.dat/Focus%2520Volume%252010%2520Issue%25203.PDF
These have been used since at least the early 90’s for spinning DNA sequencing reactions down to start the reaction (old gel electrophoresis days)!
explain me to this dumb,
BTW, how to make this spin..
jut turn with hand…
Venu, this is a spin-cord spinner. You have to pull on the cord to make it spin. There are also other models of salad spinners – some of them have a push-button that you press on. Hope this helps.
I wonder if this is a case of convergent evolution or of a slow trickling out of ideas. I invented a salad spinner idea like this about 12 years ago. We were working with radioactive isotopes in PCR and needed a way to prevent a spattering of radioactivity when opening tubes. We had access to a shared centrifuge for spinning plates, but no one wanted to deal with radioactivity in it. I came up with this idea of a salad spinner because it was fast enough to spin down 96 well tubes while still being very contained and easy to clean. The salad spinner in question was red with a white basket and had a hand crank, and the plate holders were tied down with small guage wire instead of zip ties. Otherwise the designs were identical.
I remember seeing this described back in the late 80s when I was an undergraduate. Could have been BioTechniques.
Here is a citation from 1992 which mentions the technique; a Google search suggests there are multiple patents and probably earlier examples citing repurposed salad spinners
https://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/9/6/1050.pdf
Perhaps a comprehensive survey of kitchen implements should be made to determine which others are useful for molecular biology!
(The Waring Blendor, of course, already occupies a hallowed place in the Molecular Biology hall-of-fame: Hershey-Chase)