For the working scientist: what lab instrumentation would you buy?

This one's for the molecular and cell biology and pharmaceutical chemistry crowd: what's on your current wishlist?

If you had a US$250,000 equipment budget, what would you buy to outfit the lab?

Assume that your department has all the big ticket items like real-time PCR, confocal microscopy, flow cytometer, histology gadgetry, >500MHz NMR, MALDI-TOF, LCs, etc.

And, no, not for scientist salaries - instrumentation/capital equipment only.

I just want to know if there are any newfangled whizbang thingamabobs out there that I haven't seen in the last year or two, perhaps along the lines of the Luminex Bead-Lyte technology.

More like this

XMRV is so hot right now. Read the paper on XMRV and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome last weekend: Detection of an Infectious Retrovirus, XMRV, in Blood Cells of Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome My conclusions from the paper: XMRV is capable of infecting humans and producing viable progeny. How…
New technology has led to breakthroughs in practically every aspect of our lives since the dawn of the industrial revolution. In nearly every case, it's for the betterment, in some way, of society. (And yet, I like my music best when it's acoustic, unprocessed, and barely produced at all.) Take…
By way of DrugMonkey, we come across NIH's new working group that "will examine the future of the biomedical research workforce in the United States." It's headed by Princeton's Shirley Tilghman, who in a recent interview, said: At the root of the problem is the fact that we are overproducing Ph.D…
Over at io9, they have a post on the finances of running a research lab at a major university. It's reasonably good as such things go, but very specific to the top level of research universities. As I am not at such an institution, I thought it might be worthwhile to post something about the…

A flux capacitor.

By Tegumai Bopsul… (not verified) on 06 Jun 2008 #permalink

From the statistician: a yearly license for SAS.

By John Johnson (not verified) on 06 Jun 2008 #permalink

I would definitely go for something like a nanodrop or a fluorescent microplate reader. Very, very handy. Another cool thing is a microplate high-content fluorescent microscope, for taking fluorescent images in 96-well format. Useful for large-scale screens.

And, of course, if you can convince your department to shell out for one of the extra-shiny next-generation sequencers or an LC-ESI-LTQ-Orbitrap from Thermo Fisher, there's tons of stuff that can be done with those. But those tend to be a bit more than one lab can handle, generally...