Clinical laboratories have among the most stringent requirements for purity of input materials (reagents, solvents, assay kits, gases, etc.). Yet the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA), officially promulgated in 1992, leave to clinical and diagnostic laboratory managers the task of assuring the quality and performance of chemicals and gases used to calibrate instruments and conduct general lab operations.

In my days in the lab, a pipette seemed about as impersonal as a lab tool could get. Today’s world of scientific equipment offers many ways to personalize your pipetting. For old-school scientists like me, though, the first question is: why personalize a pipette?

Many labs use chillers to control the cooling needed for some processes. To make the device work, a chiller uses a fluid, and the best kind of fluid depends on a range of factors. Part of the selection process depends on lab preferences. This article explores some of the thinking behind picking one chiller fluid over another.

The first question facing lab managers looking for an incubator is whether a dry or humidified incubator will serve their needs. Both designs have their pluses and minuses. Humidified CO2 incubators provide tighter control over cell culture conditions such as temperature, gas mix, and of course humidity.

Portable gas chromatography (pGC) is all about tradeoffs. Users demand value, reliability, ease of use, ergonomics, and measurement quality but with analysis limited to gases.

Googling the term “bead mill” retrieves dozens of links to large, process-scale devices. Add the word “laboratory” to the search string, and most products are still industrial strength.

Scientists use homogenizers in a long list of ways, including dispersing, emulsifying, cell lysis and extraction, milling, and more. These tools can homogenize a liquid and a solid, two different liquids, and other combinations of materials.

Choosing the right lab washer depends entirely on what needs to be cleaned and why. Both the labware and the washer features come into play, and these change with advances in technology.

Chromatographers often need to balance the convenience of universal-use columns against the sensitivity and resolution of specialized columns. “Where labs may at one time have employed a nonpolar, all-purpose column, they now seek columns engineered for chemical families or even specific methods,” says Timothy Anderson, GC products manager at Phenomenex (Torrance, CA).

Spectroscopy can cover a range of wavelengths, and this article focuses on the ultraviolet (UV) and visible (Vis) spectra, with a bit of near-infrared (NIR) too. These ranges allow for many applications as well as a variety of technologies.