What does one mean when discussing laboratory consumables? This includes many types of medical supplies, laboratory glassware, tubes and tubing, bags, and many miscellaneous products such as stoppers, plates, wipes, stopcocks, applicators and swabs, shipping material, clinical chemistry products, and many other general products. These are sometimes difficult to search for because there are so many items that can match the description. Here are some tips to help. If you know the manufacturer's part number, simply enter it into the search engine (google or our website search) and you should be able to quickly find the product you're looking for. If you don't know the manufacturer's part number, I would suggest being as specific as possible. The more key words you use, the more possibility of finding a correct product. Searching by brand-name is also helpful as it significantly cuts down the number of possible outcomes. So if you're searching for lab consumables by BD, Cardinal Health, Casco-Nerl, Control Company, Dow Corning, Dynalon, EMD, Greiner, Heathrow, Kendall, Kimberly Clark, Kimball, Nalge Nunc, Thermo, or dozens of other brands, be sure to look for it on microscopes.com!

It has come to our attention that many of the laboratory and medical items that we carry are restricted for one reason or another for sale. Some of these items, like heavy water are federally restricted and cannot be sold to you without a specific license to purchase this type of product. More common, however, are state restrictions. These are most always items like syringes. Now it depends what type of syringe you're purchasing. Chromatography syringes and other non-medical syringes are completely fine to purchase and do not require any type of license. Medical syringes, however, are frequently restricted because of the possibility of their misuse. These are exactly the ones I'm discussing here. Many brands are affected and in the future we will have an extra flag for the products that will require such a pharmaceutical license. For now, however, please note that the following brands may be affected: BD, Tyco, Popper & Sons, Air-Tite, Terumo America, Hamilton, Vici Precision Sampling, NLS, Omnifit, MP Biomedicals, and Humboldt Manufacturing.

Centrifuges are used in many different kinds of laboratories across the world. From research to clinical, industrial, and forensic labs, a centrifuge is used to separate liquids into different components. If you're reading this article, chances are that you need to centrifuge something down or 'spin it down.' Perhaps your lab manager told you to order another centrifuge for the lab because your current capacity isn't enough. Centrifuges can be generally divided into low speed, super speed, and ultra-speed centrifuges. About 95% of all centrifugation is done in the low speed category, generally below 20,000g. It is this category that I would like to concentrate on today. We can furter segment this category into ventilated and refrigerated centrifuges. The refrigeration is used to keep samples cold; usually at 4°C. This is usually done when centrifugating DNA, proteins, or amino acids. Microcentrifugation is usually used for DNA samples since microtubes hold small volumes in the 0.2ml - 2.0ml range. When choosing a centrifuge, several important questions need to be answered. 1)What size tubes will be used in the centrifuge. 2)How many tubes need to be spun at one time. 3)What speed to you need to centrifuge at, and 4)What temperature do you need to keep the samples at. After all these questions are answered, one can start to build a tabletop or floor-model centrifuge for one's needs. So, for example, if you need to spin 30 microtubes at 4°C at 14,000g, one centrifuge that you can use is the Eppendorf 5702R. If you're ever unsure as to how to choose a centrifuge, please contact us and one of our specialists will be happy to help you.

A recent addition to our product line are microplates. These are from the top manufacturers like Thermo Electron, Greiner, Whatman, and Labnet. Our online selection is still quite small, but we will soon be expanding it about five-fold. In addition to the mostly 96-well plates that you can purchase online, there are many other microplates available. 6, 12, 24, 48, and 384-well microplates are coming and we can even get them now! If your laboratory goes through these like water, why not give us a chance to provide you the laboratory consumables that you use every day for a low price?! We have or can obtain any plates you need for photometry, luminometry, and fluorescence. We also carry flat UV microtiter plates for those of you testing DNA, RNA, and other nucleic acid and protein determinations. These are robotic friendly and perfect for use with any UV/Vis spectrophotometers. Or else choose our popular Greiner Bio-One plates which are available with flat, round, conical, and C-bottom wells. Whatever you choose, you can be sure that microscopes.com will always support you in all your research needs.