I’m delighted to announce the arrival of a second salad spinner, this one purchased for $2 at Potter’s House, to the lab. We use these - with hot-glued PCR racks inside - as pre-PCR centrifuges. You can buy such things of course, Phenix Research has a small plate centrifuge for about $500 (and my refrigerated plate centrifuge for high-throughput DNA isolation and precipitation cost $15,000), but when all we need to do is get the bubbles out of our PCR mixes, the salad spinner does just fine!

Tags: gizmo