Might Even Fit in Your Pocket

So I've been researching lots of new systems and experiments going on in the biological field at the moment, and have come across a lot of interest in modifying plant DNA to improve all sorts of things! Such as, plant growth in cold weather, size of the seed or root, improve color based on aesthetics, even improving the amount of natural sugars found in a certain plant. Pretty cool right? and the majority of these plants have been helping to make great strides toward improving products. 

For instance, when producing soybean oil, the seed goes through 2 processes, the press and the distillation. There has been a new strain of soybean that has increased the amount of surface area on each bean, with increased surface area, more oil can be pressed out of the seed in the first pressing step, which is beneficial because less chemical and energy will be needed for the second step. Improving the overall production cost and efficiency. 

Now, in order to modify and test all these plants DNA, there is a lot of guess and check work. which requires LOTS of DNA. So scientists often use thermal cyclers to increase DNA length. A thermal cycler heats up and cools down the DNA strand in order to quickly put the DNA through it's natural reproductive process (PCR). The ability to put the DNA into a small tube and just let the machine run gives the scientists exact copies of the same DNA with little to no error. 

Normally, these thermal cyclers run for thousands and thousands of dollars, but a new  smaller commercial unit has become available. 

The Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast Dx

with a smaller 96-well unit (smaller than the 300+ commercial ones) it can produce 192 strands in 40 minutes, with the average time of other machines being about an hour. 

It comes with pre-programmed run commands, but also has an option to customize certain parameters about the process. This particular feature can be quite handy, for instance if you'd just like to make a few copies, using the pre-progammed commands are fast and efficient, but if you have a particularly complicated sample using the custom run commands can insure no mistakes in the copy. 

 

The 7500 also has modern aesthetics to it, with the help of a sleek white exterior and high-tech LCD screens. 

 but i think the best feature of this particular instrument though is the "Assurance Service Plan". The company includes both software and hardware support 24 hours a day. Installation and operation training are standard on every machine purchased, along with a software and calibration setup. So. for low-tech people like myself this is a total plus, anytime you run into an error or warning your unfamiliar with you can call up the support team FOR FREE <win-win> and they will either walk you through how to fix it or send out a service team for emergency repairs! including parts and labor!

So, for the price, it seems like this smaller thermal cycler  definitely has bang for the buck. Granted it's not going to produce the hundreds of samples that a commercialized thermal cycler would but if your company is only interested in small scale research the 7500 seems to be a great pick!