• Question: What equipment do you use on a daily basis?

    Asked by loki to Dave, Matt on 22 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 22 Nov 2013:


      My cells grow in an incubator to keep them warm and make sure they have the right amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide, so I have to go into the incubator to get my cells out every day. I then take my cells into a special hood (there’s a picture on my profile) where I feed the cells. This hood blows air out of it to make sure that everything inside the hood is kept sterile and I don’t get infections in the plates that the cells I work with are growing in. When feeding the cells I use suction pumps to remove the liquid they grow in and pipettes to replace with fresh liquid.

      I also regularly use centrofuges to spin down tubes of cells so that I can separate out different parts of the cell for experiments. For my work looking at how much sugar the cells use, I use something called a spectrophotometer which I can use to work out how much glucose is in a liquid. I also do electrolysis, which means splitting things using electricity. To do this I have a special tank where I can separate proteins or DNA for experiments.

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 22 Nov 2013:


      Hi loki

      I use a lot of the same equipment as Dave, cells need to be kept sterile so they don’t get infected with bugs so we do all our work in cell culture hoods. I also use an incubator to keep my cells at the correct temperature so they grow well.

      I think there are a couple of different things I use. The most important is a piece of equipment called a flow cytometer, it is a very expensive machine (£100,000) for seeing what proteins are on the surface of the cells. It works by having really narrow tubes that the cells are taken through so they are lined up, they are then hit with laser light which reacts with antibodies we have put onto the cells, showing which proteins are on which cells. I also do some work with magnets to separate cells, which is sort of similar to the flow cytometer. The other thing that is really important for me is the vice we have, this is quite grim, but we use it to crack the teeth open, if we didn’t have that I wouldn’t be able to get the cells out in the first place, so it’s quite important for my work.

Comments