we are one of importer of Labrotary equipment

we need the following item

1. Triple wide mini vertical rig (For.gel electrophorasis)
2. Gel Documentation unit

pls kindly inform price cataloge and specification

Regards

Md masudul amin sohel

Director

MinMax Corporation

Sector#12 Road#11 House#05 Uttara

Dhaka,Bangladesh

Tel:008801718810775

Web:www.minmaxbd.net

Hailing from the Dirty South (United States for those that don’ know).

Developing protocols using retail supplies is worthwhile for educational use. Our Cellular/Molecular Biology Club had a great time doing DIY DNA extraction with grocery store reagents. Using dish detergent, salt, etc. also helped reinforce the function of each component instead of just cookbooking some BioRad kit. This would be a fun activity for K-12 outreach projects, and affordable for a student club. (We have access to gel boxes etc. in the teaching lab but need to provide reagents.)

Unless you want to publish your results, which would probably go more smoothly if reviewers saw you were using bonafide supplies and protocols, there may be instances where the cost difference between biotech and retail supplies makes a big difference. Remembering my thesis budget, all those things add up fast.

Although some reagents are relatively cheap from a regular biotech supplier, some are not. Let’s take agar as an example. I was just wondering about continuing my C. elegans research as a DIY project, and one of the ongoing costs is lots of agar plates. The bacto-agar I use (which is way cheaper than agarose) is still over $100 per pound. I can get 5 lbs of restaurant-supply agar for about $100, or 1 lb for around $20. Likewise, I’d guess that canning salt or kosher salt would work fine for NGM agar at a fraction of the cost of chemical-supply sodium chloride. (Table salt has additives to prevent lumps, and sea salt has

I wouldn’t want ethidium bromide around my home (garage, storage unit, hackerspace) after all the warnings we got about it in lab. It’s highly toxic and mutagenic, and it’s hard not to make at least some mess when soaking/rinsing the gels. I’d worry about how to dispose of leftovers, too.

However, I think a key to successfully pulling this off and being able to carry out meaningful experiments far cheaper than institutionally based research will be learning where to skimp on materials and where to simply go for the real thing.

Several hundred dollars for a gel box is just ridiculous and I have no doubt that you can make your own for far cheaper that will work very well. Building your own gel box is a case where you get far, far more value for your money by DIYing compared to buying off-the-shelf apparatus.

However for reagents and materials, I think there is less value to be gained by using “household chemicals.” From looking on eBay and googling chemical names, it seems like for a few hundred dollars anyone could put together a collection of the chemicals necessary to make common buffer solutions (for example the components of TBE running buffer), gel material (acrylamide or agarose), a reagent such as ethidium bromide to visualize DNA, and a scale which can measure to sufficient precision to be useful for basic applications. These reagents typically come in fairly large bottles that take university lab groups a while to go through and should last you for a long time.

In other words, for a surprisingly small sum of money, you can follow standard protocols. In minutes, you can prepare any concentration of agarose gel you want (weigh out the proper amount of agarose for the volume you’re using, mix, and microwave).

The place where money can really be saved is on overpriced apparatus that’s only expensive because it’s marked “scientific.” When you obviously have such a cohesive group of people working together in real life, everyone chipping in $50 would be enough to assemble a collection of reagents that allow you to simply follow the same protocols used by established labs. Then, the focus can turn from producing “home versions” of simple protocols to performing useful experiments far more quickly.