Today, the number of distinct GC column stationary phases has grown

Fast-Growing, Innovative, But Still Somewhat Enigmatic.

After applications and processes, workflow optimization is the primary consideration when setting up a cell culture lab. Workflow relates to how samples and cultures move through the lab, the number of operations going on simultaneously, and chain of custody.

In this Q & A, three experts from both academia and industry discuss the types of cell culture they perform in their labs, technologies they use, and the challenges they face.

As Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan famously noted, “The medium is the message.” So it is with cell culture, where media and feed or supplementation strategies have been responsible for more improvement in cell productivity and performance than any other factors.

Isolating facility and layout from equipment during planning and maintenance of a cell culture lab
entails considerable risk, if for no other reason than the latter must fit into the former.

Although cell culture is more than 100 years old, it has only been applied to the manufacture of biological drugs for about 25 years. Today mammalian cell culture is the workhorse production platform for most of biotech’s protein therapeutics and increasingly for cell- and virus-based vaccines.

Mass spectrometry (MS) has not quite become a routine acquisition for every lab that might benefit from it. Nor are MS instruments yet capable of serving routine users and experimenters equally well. But the characteristics and performance of instrumentation serving high and low-end applications overlap more now than ever.

Ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectrophotometry is arguably the most common as well as one of the oldest forms of absorption-based analysis. UV and visible regions of the electromagnetic spectrum are contiguous: UV wavelengths range from 10 to 4000 angstroms; they are visible from 4000 to 7000 angstroms.

Gene sequencing is all about data—3.2 gigabytes for a single human genome, with several times that for making raw sequences relevant to real-world problems. Mining the genome for medical intelligence multiplies the data “crunch” for gene sequencers and value-added services that annotate gene sequences for their relevance to protein and metabolite concentrations, and to both diseased and healthy states.

Collaborative research is one of the justifications cited most often for acquiring lab data software. While such “soft” benefits are difficult to quantify, the “hard” benefits are easy to measure, after some digging.

LIMS and ELNs do not pose care and upkeep problems that an IT administrator does not encounter with any database system: performing data backups, building in redundancy, and having a plan for power outages.

Laboratories are awash in data. The two main data management packages in use today are laboratory information management systems (LIMS) for structured data such as pH values or sample weights and electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) for unstructured data such as images and chemical formulas.

Thermal analysis is the broad category of at least 20 techniques that measure some fundamental property of matter as a result of adding heat.