If you're doing any magnetic separations using beads from StemCell Technologies, or Miltenyi, or even Dynal beads, this unit may be of interest to you. The RoboSep from StemCell Technologies uses a very simple design to automate the pipetting necessary to couple your cells of interest to the paramagnetic beads. Once coupled, the built-in magnet will fractionate the coupled cells and the uncoupled cells allowing you to positively or negatively select your cells of interest. There are 4 magnets in the unit allowing you to fractionate up to 4 samples simultaneously. The touch-screen interface allows easy setup of samples and incubation times. The utility of the "magnetic sorters" can be maximized in the case that you wish to sort cells in the facility. A pre-enrichment of the population of interest can be done magnetically allowing you to decrease the amount of time on the sorters.
During the time that the facility has the demo unit, we will ask anyone interested to please try it out. Our StemCell contact is Rory Connelly (rory@stemcell.com). He has agreed to assist you with getting your samples run on the instrument, and the flow facility will allow you to re-run your samples on the analyzers free-of-charge (to check purity and yield post sort). We would also like to get feedback on the usefullness of such an instrument in the core. Would you realistically travel to the core facility to do your magnetic separations? Does it actually work for your project? This information will be very useful as we evaluate the instrument.
Feel free to contact us in the flow lab as well if you want more information
I hated that machine. It only works if you have very small numbers of cells and don't care how many you get back
ReplyDeleteno one used it, and it left shortly after it arrived.
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