ElectroPen: An ultralow-cost piezoelectric electroporator

Electroporation is a powerful alternative to heat shock for delivering small molecules such as plasmids across cell membranes.  By application of an electrical field netivetly charged DNA is forced into elector-competent cells by an electrohoresis-type effect. Electroporators can be expensive, generally over $2000, hence the popularity of more chemical solutions such as heat shock. Enter […]

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Pretty Good Focus

There is nothing worse than arriving in the morning to find that your overnight data acquisition drifted out of focus two hours in. However, commercial focus stabilization set ups only come on expensive and relatively recent microscopes. The coy-ly named Pretty Good Focus (pgFocus), is an open source hardware/software device for focus stabilization designed by Karl […]

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Making Vacuum Chambers

If you would like to make an essentially free vacuum chamber with pump, Chris Notap has a useful video on making one out of spare parts using a vacuum pump from a discarded dehumidifier or fridge. Component parts are in the description. If you want something a little more solid, check out this write up […]

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