electroporators

[Doug Prasher]

Fellow Netters,

Below is a summary of the responses to my June 21 posting requesting
people's comments regarding commercially available electroporators
(BRL, Hoeffer, Fisher, BioRad) for BACTERIAL TRANSFORMATIONS:

A total of 5 people responded, three of which are using the BioRad
unit.  One reported a transformation efficiency of 10E10.  If you never
replied to my first posting, yours comments are still welcome.

Some of the comments received to date are copied here:

Comment #1: I have not used any but the BioRad unit.  It works very well. 
While it is rather expensive, we chose it because it has very nice 
design of cuvettes that one can place anywhere from
40 micorliters to 1 ml.  These cuvettes are $3 a piece, but are steam
sterilizable.  The BioRad unit gives  about the highest voltage per cm
of any unit when using a 4 mm path.  This is particularly relavant when
doing bacterial electroporations.  Using the protocols provided, we get
10E10 transformants per microgram of input test plasmids.

Comment #2:  We are just in the process of getting an electroporator for 
bacteria. One thing you may not be aware of is that most of the units 
you ask about need an attachment to work efficiently with bacteria. 
This is called different things from different companies, but basically
increases the voltage to 4000 or 6000 volts. It adds about $600 to 
the price of the BRL and BioRAd systems. I do not know if Hoeffer or
Fisher need it or not. Be sure to get prices for systems designed for
bacteria, and not systems designed for plant or mammalian cells which 
I think is true of the Hoeffer specifically. Also IBI has just 
introduced a new model.

Thanks to the following people for sending their comments:
		MW Clarke
		Dana Fowkles
		Mike Benedik
		John McFadden
		Patrick Linder
 

Douglas Prasher
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution