Equipment and techniques
Here are pictures of some of the equipment that we use in the laboratory.
PCR Machine
The PCR machine, or thermocycler, is a cornerstone of most biology labs. In it,
we run polymerase chain reactions. This technique requires repeated cycles at
multiple different temperatures. When PCR was developed, researchers used to
use several water baths and move their samples between them. You can see if you
have to do this 30 times, over a couple of hours, how that might get boring.
This machine can be programmed to carry out repeated heating and cooling. You
can even set it up and leave it overnight, if aren't excited enough by the
experiments to want to see the result immediately.
Bench top FACS machine
We use flow cytometry to ask which cells from a tissue, such as the blood or
spleen, are expressing specific molecules. We tag these molecules with
antibodies that also have a fluorochrome attached. The cells are streamed in
front of a laser (or lasers) and if antibody is binding we can detect the
fluorochrome using this piece of equipment. The machine shown here can detect 4
different colours (and therefore 4 different proteins) simultaneously. Our new
cytometer, the LSR II, can detect 9 colours simultaneously.
