THE INCREASING reliance of laboratories on electronic documentation brings with it both penalties and bonuses. A move towards paperless status has advantages in cost and reduced environmental footprint, but can add complexity to regulatory requirements. One example of this is…
Month: July 2012
Agilent claims European patent victory
AGILENT Technologies has today claimed a victory over rival Affymetrix, after a ruling from the European Patent Office upheld its opposition to a patent including the term ‘control probe’. Affymetrix’s European Patent EP 0853679, covering ‘Expression monitoring by hybridization to…
Forensic fingerprinting from spent cartridges
A NOVEL system to image fingerprints on spent gun cartridges has been made available to forensics experts thanks to a custom made lens from Resolve Optics. The new technique, Cartridge Electrostatic Recovery and Analysis (Cera), can extract fingerprints when other…
More details of Planet xMap 2012
LUMINEX has announced further details of its 10th annual Planet xMap congress, to be held on 10-11 October 2012 at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. Over 500 leading scientists are expected to gather at the event, sharing information and discoveries…
Microscope lens is a record breaker
A NEW microscope objective from Olympus claims a new world record numerical aperture (NA) of 1.7, enabling the highest Z-resolution ever recorded for a Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF) microscope, says the company. The practical benefits of this performance include…
Five-step programme to good pipetting practice
FEW OPERATIONS are as fundamental to modern laboratory practice as pipetting, which plays a vital role in a great many experiments. The importance of accuracy and repeatability which applies to all lab operations is especially relevant here, as any errors…
Big six banned E coli pathogens now available
FOLLOWING the announcement by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of mandatory testing for six serogroups of E Coli in the food chain, ATCC has made available all six of the newly-banned pathogens. Each of these non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing…
Weekly news: biology beats electronics in data density
I got to thinking about data storage density the other day, when an old floppy disk was found at the back of a drawer. It wasn’t quite a ‘what’s that Daddy?’ moment, but almost. The first computer I ever touched…
The lab steriliser gets personal
A NOTICEABLE trend in lab equipment in recent years has been the growth of the ‘personal’ scale machine. Where once almost any item of kit was an expensive resource that had to be shared across the bench, nowadays everything from…
Aseptic sampling with walk-away automation
AN AUTOMATED sampling workstation that collects samples directly and aseptically from bioreactors can save time, remove risk of error, and improve quality control, says Alfa Wassermann. The company says its Empat system is easy to install and program, operates continuously…