Vacuum pumps are essential, but little understood by users.

Incubators are enabling cell and microbiological culture for industry as well as basic research.

Delivering interfering RNA into whole organisms (vs. cells) presents even greater challenges, but the potential rewards are also high.

Chromatographers who learned their craft twenty years ago may not have been familiar with autosamplers then, but today nearly every high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) instrument includes an autosampler as standard equipment.

It would be difficult to imagine a chemistry laboratory without at least one fume hood. Despite their ubiquity and the notion that they are not “sexy” lab products, a great deal of innovation has occurred in fume hoods during the last decade.

It is not much of a stretch to say that the 1961 introduction of the plunger-operated pipette revolutionized laboratory work.

“Nobody gets excited about lab ovens,” comments one vendor, “but ovens are definitely essential lab components.”

Anyone who works in a lab quickly learns the value of labware washers. Today washers are almost as common in laboratories as they are in kitchens.

Water is the lifeblood of all laboratories. Purified water, in particular, serves a variety of operations and applications, from wet chemistry to instrumental analysis.

Chillers are refrigerators that cool down samples or processes to preset temperatures by removing heat from one element and transferring it to another, typically air or water.

There are two main groups of centrifuge purchasers: those who perform routine work and those who value flexibility

Microplate readers are used extensively in the pharmaceutical industry for high-throughput drug screening and in biology labs for enzyme assays, immunoassays, binding assays, protein and cell assays, ELISAs, and biomolecule concentration measurements.

Choice of clean room casework, or furniture, is one of the most important decisions made when setting up classified space.

Invented in the late 16th century, the microscope is arguably the oldest laboratory instrument. Yet despite its maturity, microscopy continues to evolve toward greater capabilities.

Low-temperature laboratory freezers are cooling boxes that achieve temperatures of about -40° C or lower. Kitchen freezers, by contrast, operate to about -20° C.