A delightfully useful paper centered on 3D printing of microscopes has been written by Mario Del Rosario, Hannah Heil, Afonso Mendes, Vittorio Saggiomo and Ricardo Henriques. The paper covers a bevy of topics and tips from the basics behind infill patterns to the specifics concerning biocompatibility. It’s a great resource for anyone involved with 3D […]
Colosseum: open source automated fraction collector
In a follow-up to my all time favorite post, Protein Purification on a Budget: Technical Tuesday, today we are covering a design for a fraction collector for <$100. In their recent preprint, Low-cost, scalable, and automated fluid sampling for fluidics applications , A. S. Boosehaghi, Y.A. Kil, K. H. Min, J. Gehring and L. Pachter […]
Upgrade a 2-photon microscope with high-speed FLIM for $2352
Fluorescence-lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a microscopy technique used to measure the lifetime of a fluorophore rather than its intensity. Sensitive to the sample region’s micro-environment, lifetime measurements aren’t limited to measuring molecule concentration like traditional microscopy, but can also indicate environmental effects such as pH or viscosity. Additionally, this technique is not as affected […]
$6 Printed Mini Centrifuge
This 3D printed design for a mini centrifuge caught our eye as a lab hack that is reminiscent of the early days of this blog (UV lamp, Sillouette design cutter). Mini centrifuges are ubiquitous in wet labs. Very simple machines, they are sold by Eppendorf and other scientific manufacturers for $150-200. If your lab has […]
Automated Western Blotting
Western Blots are a ubiquitous technique in biological and biochemical laboratories used to detect a specific protein in a sample using antibody binding. Running a western blot is one of the more mundane and time consuming tasks of a lab researcher. A new paper “Open source automated western blot processor” from Jorge Bravo-Martinez describes a […]