Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Our sales have been increasing steadily. Thank you to everyone who has been purchasing all the laboratory equipment and lab consumables that we carry. Some items that I've been getting questions on lately has been microplate instrumentation. We carry several brands of microplate readers including Beckman Coulter, Turner Biosystems, Thermo Electron, and many others. These include microplate photometers that read in the UV and Visible ranges. We also carry Fluorometers and Luminometers that read fluorescence and luminescence, accordingly. When you use these readers, please don't forget to purchase the correct microplates for your particular experiment. Photometers use quartz or UV plates to read such things as DNA or RNA. You can use regular polypropylene microplates for visible readings. Black plates are used for fluoresence to cut down on the amount of crosstalk in microwells. White plates are best for luminescence, which normally gives such a weak signal, that white plates are the only ones that can maximize the signal given off from the microplate reader. In the last few years, there has been a rise in the number of multifunction readers being manufactured. These would read a combinations of absorbance, fluorescence and luminescense. Other experiments that can be now done are enzymatic kinetics reactions, TRF, and many other experiments.