Each one of these costs more than the building itself
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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I do lab planning for a living and sometimes I like to play "How Many Houses Could This Instrument Buy?" with my coworkers. Usually it's something along the lines of 0.1 to 1 houses, but every once in a while we do a process development lab for some biotech firm, and they want to spring for one of those Satorious automated bioreactors. Those things cost "a whole block's worth of nice houses in a mid-major metro" money.
So like $10 million dollars?
Nowadays this exercise does more to show how absurd housing prices are than it shows about instrument prices.
Except thermocyclers, literally available on aliexpress these days
Look, if we don’t make the boxes beige, people will want to play with them, and that could lead to fun and/or death.
Ah, but this one goes BEEP.
Ugh, I wish. Almost none of them have any cool sound effects.
I love labs were they are like "we use three tools. A toothpick you can get at any restaurant, a device invented in the middle ages that hasn't changed and is still made by like 30 people tops, and the million dollar magic machine that we don't really understand"
Don't forget beige box that shakes the thing.
That's how we in IT treat those. Now please budget to replace them when its software only uses an EOL operating system. We don't like windows xp running something 'critical' to the business.
If they are networked I can definitely agree.
If not, the only functional difference you get for upgrading is exchanging the floppy drive for a usb port.
It's really hard to convince people to replace a 6+ digit piece of machinery all because its control system has an EOL OS. Especially considering upgrading it to the newest model most likely means upgrading the OS from Windows 95 to Windows XP (embedded).
If it was Linux that had open-source software that could be updated independently by forking it, then this EOL BS would never be a thing, but nope, proprietary stuff gets execs get hard as rocks
Anyone know what all of these are?
Top right is a real time PCR instrument, bottom left is a DNA sequencer, bottom right is a type of proprietary flow cytometer. Idk top left.
Tip left looks like the thermocyclyer we used to use in my genetics labs
It's a bio-rad thermocycler.
ELI5 what any of these are?
PCR is a method of replicating specific targeted portions of DNA. To perform the method you need to regulate the temperature in a very specific pattern using a thermal cycler (top left?). This will give you 'bulk' portions of your DNA.
If instead your test was just to see of your targetted portion was present real-time PCR is the method for you. It regulates the temperature like a thermal cycler but is also able to reliably determine if DNA is is being replicated very early in the cycle.
DNA sequencer (bottom left) gets you your nucleotide sequence. I'm not familiar enough with the machine to talk about how it's doing this. It really depends how much genomic info you need.
Flow cytometry is a method of detecting fluorescence on really small things, usually with fluorescently tagged antibodies involved. Say you have a test tube of cells and you want to know how many are human B cells. We can add some tagged antibody that binds B cells, then run the sample through the instrument. It has a fluid path that separates all the cells using laminar flow and then passes them by a laser. If the laser energy excites the antibody tag it will glow and the instrument can detect that light, which tells us that our antibody stuck to that cell. We can count it as a B cell. The instrument is capable of counting thousands of these events per second.
These are very generic descriptions but you can get the idea of what is happening.
Thank you very much for this explanation!
The experience of walking through the wafer fab at my work
Your mom's beige box is where the magic happens!
Getting real close to turning science in rituals.
When I first started in the gc area of my previous lab I was in charge of training the interns in the other areas of the lab, but I'd give an impromptu tour of the gc/gcms/gcmsms area of the lab, I'd explain the gc as "the magical science gnomes work in this box, we bring a technician in here once a year to make sure they're fed and given fresh water", and had no idea how to explain an ms let alone an msms/triplequadrapole. By the end I could hand wave away the gc (along with do the yearly maintenance), I do a pretty good job at explaining the ms without relying too much on the term "magic" (but it totally is) and the msms? That shit is so close to magical that I think it always will be explained with some use of "magic". I understand the theory behind it, but how the hell does it do what it does??
White, Blue and Black Machine soon for people that do Coagulation