Team:UNIPV-Pavia/Instruments

An autoclave is a self-locking apparatus used to sterilize equipment and supplies by subjecting them to high pressure saturated steam. It allows steam to flow around each article placed in the chamber. The vapor penetrates cloth or paper used to package the articles being sterilized. Autoclaving brings to the destruction of all types of microorganisms, including spores. Therefore, autoclave is widely used in microbiology, medicine, veterinary science, mycology or chiropody; its size varies on the media it is sterilizing. The amount of time and degree of temperature necessary for sterilization depend on the articles to be sterilized and whether they are wrapped or left directly exposed to the steam. Typically the process is run at 121°C or more for 15 to 20 minutes and it is essential to ensure that all the trapped air is removed, because hot air is less efficient than steam to achieve sterility.

In order to grow bacteria a culture media is needed, together with plates (petri-dishes), some laboratory supplies and incubators. The incubator is an oven able to keep bacteria at the desired temperature; the typical temperature needed to allow a rapid growth of bacteria is 37 °C.

Shaking incubators, also known as environmental shakers, are often used for cell culturing, cell aeration and solubility studies. In addition to stable temperature conditions, they use an orbital agitation at variable speeds to affect the growth of cell cultures, displaced in a liquid media. All major functions (temperature, RPM and time) have alarms that alert the user to deviations from set parameters. Overtemperature protection is provided via a safety thermostat. Digital keypad operation offers the ability to calibrate the temperature controller to a reference thermometer.

It is a laminar flow hood for handling highly toxic products.

It is a bath in which water is heated to high temperatures for gel extraction and heath shock during bacterial transformation.

Gel electrophoresis apparatus - Agarose gel is placed in this TBE buffer filled box and electrical field is applied via the power supply to the rear. The negative terminal is the black one while the positive is the red one. In this way DNA, that is naturally negatively charged, migrates to the positive pole.

It is a UV system with camera used to acquire gel run snapshots.

We have freezers where Dna and bacterial cultures are stocked. In particular we have two -20 C freezers to stock DNA and one -80 C freezer to stock bacteria.
We have also a fridge to stock plates and LB medium

Nanodrop is a really helpfull instrument used to measure concentration of DNA in a micro-volume of sample and OD in cell cultures.

Tecan Infinite F200 is a multifunctional microplate filter-based reader with injector option, that provides high performance for the vast majority of microplate applications and research. It has been designed as a general purpose laboratory instrument for professional use, supporting common 6 to 384-well microplates. This instrument allows long incubation of the microplate, the chance to set the shaking movements, the duration of all operations, including cycles, and the dispensation of liquid material in the wells. These actions are managed by a user interface operated by i-Control software, ranging from scheduling experiments to the cleaning of injectors. We used this instrument for the following measurement techniques:

• fluorescence intensity;
• absorbance.

The Molecular Biology room is the place in which we treat DNA.
The Bacteria room is the place in which we work with bacteria. In this room the temperature is 37°C for growth of bacterial culture.