• Thrashy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        So like $10 million dollars?

        Nowadays this exercise does more to show how absurd housing prices are than it shows about instrument prices.

    • Bye@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Except thermocyclers, literally available on aliexpress these days

      • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        You can get almost every piece of lab equipment on Ali. Wether or not you’ll actually get one, or if it does what you want is another matter though.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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”

    • Turun@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Does win XP and x-ray/uv/florescence count? That’s already on there.

  • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I’ve done time in biotech and in applied physics, and damn the gear over in the APh labs is cool as fuck.

    I want an optics table for mini gaming.

    I want a device that cools itself to -76F, evacuates itself to intergalactic pressures, then heats up a coil hot enough to vaporize gold for…

    Well, I’ll find a use for it anyway.

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I want an optics table for mini gaming.

      A highschool lens-and-prism set is like 30-40 bucks on aliexpress, including a triple laserpointer. Not quite an optics table, but I’m assuming you don’t do your tabletop gaming with orange goggles and/or actual half-molten minis?

      • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I plan on counting fringes to evaluate distances for my 40K sessions.

        And yes, we use a welding laser to stimulate radiation damage.

  • bajabound@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Inktvip@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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).

    • waitwuhtt@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • waitwuhtt@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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??