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.

Comments

#1 RobertC
June 6, 2008

Do you have a advanced microplate reader? The newer ones can do kinetics in absorbance, fluorescence or fluorescence polarization modes, and also FRET/BRET type assays.

http://www.tecan.com/platform/apps/product/index.asp?MenuID=1875&ID=2404&Menu=1&Item=21.2.10.2

And if your doing serious assays, I’d get a liquid handler/robot to set up the assay precisely.
#2 Tegumai Bopsulai, FCD
June 6, 2008

A flux capacitor.
#3 John Johnson
June 6, 2008

From the statistician: a yearly license for SAS.
#4 kevin z
June 6, 2008

Or save your self the money and countless and learn R. Free and better!

Buy a supercomputer.
#5 Abel Pharmboy
June 6, 2008

Hey, Tegumai – what vendor should I use?
#6 Terry
June 6, 2008

I have not used them myself, but if I were setting up a lab from scratch, I would consider a cuvetteless spectrophotometer.

http://www.nanodrop.com/
#7 such.ire
June 6, 2008

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…