Electroporation is a powerful alternative to heat shock for delivering small molecules such as plasmids across cell membranes. By application of an electrical field netivetly charged DNA is forced into elector-competent cells by an electrohoresis-type effect. Electroporators can be expensive, generally over $2000, hence the popularity of more chemical solutions such as heat shock. Enter […]
Month: December 2018
Pretty Good Focus
There is nothing worse than arriving in the morning to find that your overnight data acquisition drifted out of focus two hours in. However, commercial focus stabilization set ups only come on expensive and relatively recent microscopes. The coy-ly named Pretty Good Focus (pgFocus), is an open source hardware/software device for focus stabilization designed by Karl […]
Making a Solid State Cooling Block with PipetteJockey
We’d like to feature the work of PipetteJockey, and in this post we do that under the guise of a pseudo-tutorial they have posted on how to hack together a Solid State Cooling Block. The tutorial isn’t exactly detailed in the step-by-step, it makes the assumption that you already have a heat-sink block, and it’s up […]
Smartphone Fluorescence Spectroscopy
Want to do portable florescence spectroscopy on the cheap? Hojeong Yu, Yafang Tan, and Brian T. Cunningham wrote a 2014 paper that demonstrates that a smartphone camera, attached to a set of optical components that provide wavelength dispersion and a green laser pointer, can function as a sensitive fluorescence spectrometer.