The below is a gel showing PCR reactions from the final OpenPCR prototype that will be used for our kit production. This experiment was done to validate various polymerases rather than test OpenPCR, but thought you may want to see it. Lane 1 at the right is a control with no polymerase. Lanes 2 – 4 show amplification of a ~1kb amplicon with different polymerases/salt concentrations. Lanes 3-4 have a different loading dye, but pay attention to the fluorescent DNA band (imaged with GelGreen / Invitrogen Safe Imager).
This is just an early glimpse – when we release the final machine kit, we’ll include a gel image with well-by-well results for an identical reaction. That release is thankfully getting closer – over the weekend Tito and I tested a prototype with full mechanical assembly and got excellent results, so we’re just getting the final pieces into production. Stay tuned for the official release date!
Hey Josh, Do you have a UV transilluminator too? You should try Gel Red. It’s much easier to see since the excitation/emission peaks are further apart and work just fine with the orange filter. I just recently switched all my gels away from EtBr; pro: Gel Red seems to be more sensitive… con is that it’s easy to overload the lanes with DNA. Btw is the gel picture upside down?
Hi Norman!
I have a UV transilluminator but typically have been using blue light to not worry about UV safety. What precautions do you typically use when working with UV? Do you have a geldoc or some sort of face shield? I can see how the gel could look upside down from Hawaii :)
In addition to the PCR machine what else is required to have a basic DNA lab? If I am not mistaken, PCR creates enough material for the analysis but does not do any analysis by itself….
Thank you!