Despite my profligate spending in other regards, there are some things around the lab that I’m extremely tight about. One piece of equipment I’ve always hated has been the gel documentation system. It is ridiculous how much UVP and others charge for what is basically a camera hovering over a UV transilluminator. The system I purchased when I started my lab worked OK; all we did was take pics, adjust them a bit with the software on an old Dell, and print to the laser printer if we needed. But, I grumbled about printing out each gel - why do we need all those pictures? In our line of work, we essentially only need this documentation to figure out which reactions worked (a check mark in your lab book does as well) or to put in a presentation (you would only put a photo of an agarose gel in your talk if you have nothing else interesting to say, I’m guessing). So, we phased out printing. And then the camera stopped working about a year ago, and the amount of effort it takes to find a camera that fits all the input/output requirements, and the cost of cameras that do (generally only higher-end cameras have the proper I/O, accept a UV filter, etc.), kept me frustrated. So the gel doc has remained broken, but we have come to the point where everybody working in the lab generally has a pretty good camera phone that can email images - ta da! The new gel doc era is born....now I’m wondering if there is an App for this....

Tags: green lab, gizmo, images