Genevac shows off its evaporators for lab research

The company aims to improve on the current process that is used extensively in laboratories requiring high throughput evaporation

The lyophilisation process involves taking the cell suspensions and placing them in small vials, which are then frozen by immersing in a mixture of dry ice and acetone or liquid nitrogen.

The vials are then evacuated and dried under vacuum, sealed and stored at a low temperature.

This method provides advantages particularly in long-term culture survival without a change in characteristics.

Also, lyophilised cultures take little space for storing. Although cultures can be stored for long periods by this method, viability depends to an extent the quality of glass vial oil used.

Using Genevac HT series evaporators, HPLC fractions can be concentrated to a few millilitres and then frozen and rapidly lyophilised to produce a diffuse dry powder, which can be re-dissolved or weighed out.

The new LyoSpeed facility allows the volatile organic solvent to be removed from the HT-Series evaporator condenser enabling the system to achieve the deep vacuums necessary to achieve good lyophilisation, without user intervention.

Genevac intends to preview its range of HT series evaporators forthcoming DDT 2006 exhibition in Boston (MA) USA.

The exhibition will also be a chance for Genevac to show off its second-generation EZ-2 personal evaporator launched earlier this year.

The EZ-2 is able to evaporate solvents in typically half the time of traditional evaporator designs.

Further time savings are made as users can see solvents as they collect in the trap and emptying the collection vessel is simple, requiring no defrosting.

Also on display will be the Genevac HT12 Series II system - an evaporator designed to provide a solution for evaporation bottlenecks in the drug discovery laboratory.

The design of the system's multi layer rotor ensures efficient use of laboratory bench space as well as high performance and high throughput evaporation.