Creating the industry’s first powerful workflow innovation in more than 30 years for plasmid prep and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) cleanup, Beckman Coulter Life Sciences launches the EMnetik System to semi-automate workflows while drastically reducing the amount of time required to achieve a PCR cleanup.
Built using electromagnets, EMnetik 24 and the accompanying EMnetik PCR Cleanup Kit and EMnetik Plasmid Purification Kit uses revolutionary magnetic bead-based technology to clean nucleic acids in a stationary device, says the company.
Touchpoints to complete PCR cleanup are significantly reduced by up to 80% compared to leading spin-column products, slashing 300 touchpoints to just 50. PCR cleanup can also be achieved in 16 minutes, down from 30 minutes expediting and improving bead mixing and separation. The small yet powerful benchtop instrument can run 1-24 samples at a time. The streamlined cleanup process and semi-automation also helps eliminate the potential for errors.
“For early lab students it can be a hard lesson learned to write on the vial, only to have the ethanol wash drastically smudge the writing,” said Dr. Brittany Niccum, commercial product manager in the company’s Genomic Reagents Biotechnology Business Unit. “I remember as a young scientist the errors this created in my runs, and the frustrating time it added to the process. We’re excited to introduce this innovation and bring DNA cleanup into 21st century.”
Powered by reagents containing SuperSPRI beads and the EMnetik 24 microparticle processor, the system offers PCR cleanup twice as fast as leading column-based kits, offering significant updates for synthetic and molecular biology industries, which last saw workflow update for plasmid prep and PCR cleanup in 1991, says Beckman. These kits have proliferated into every lab that performs basic molecular biology processes. For more info, see www.beckman.com.
