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Invitrogen's 96-well E-gel

Date: 2009-01-17 19:17:04 Member: Jason Garner Category: Product Discipline: Life Sciences Link: http://products.invitrogen.com/

Making your own agarose gels was a dirty, laborious, and time consuming activity and, thankfully, is a thing of the past. Not to mention handling dangerous chemicals like adding ethidium bromide in order to visualize your products.

Invitrogen's answer? Precast, bufferless gels in single (12-well) or double comb (18-well - 2 for ladder) configurations. Simply prime the gel, add your products, add ladder, and hit the go button. The gels sit in a small, light, plastic carrier powered by a 110V outlet. 12-well gels run for about 30 minutes and 18-well gels, 15. My lab goes through a ton of these things in a year and are worth their weight in gold.

Now they've answered with a 96-well variety. COOL! I had seen them on their website, but for the most part could not justify using them based on our work loads. Well, I was at the CDC recently and finally got to take one for a testdrive. The gels are set up similarly to a 96-well plate lay-out (12 columns X 8 rows) only the wells are a bit offset - smart. You can use most standard 8- and 12- channel pipettes to do the work as well - something you can't do with the 12- and 18-well.

The gel has a bigger base yet still almost a negligible footprint. Same deal - turn it on, prime, load, voila...results. In my case it was a whopping 3 minutes! You kiddin' me? The products I was running are relatively small (<500bp) and the purpose was not to QC the size, rather obtain either a 'yes/no' answer. If the product was there, I moved on to downstream processes. Now, if you're running larger products this may not be for you.

Great stuff - two thumbs up.

Comments (1)

Vote (5)

by Agnieszka Lichanska 1102 days ago

Perfect timing I was considering buying the system for our lab. I am used to using Cambrex Flash gel which was good for small projects but not for high throughput. One more thing I wanted to point out is that Invitrogen system can be integrated with robotics system if you have one set up.