Chuiying Li,
I'm just coming out of the "Conformational Test Site" on the model 3100 that our lab recently purchased. The short answer would be: buy a 3100.
Long Answer: at first I thought "wassup with abi?" They make a CE instrument but it doesn't have sheath flow and it only has 16 CE's? But after running one it all begins to make sense.
Sheath flow: you don't have any of the problems of sheath flow. Bubbles, expensive polymer whizzing away etc. With the laser split and shining from both ends of a 16 array you seem to get plenty of signal. The results I have been getting seem to at least match the nice signal/noise you achieve on a 3700 and from preliminary runs you get good numbers out through 650, (on a 50cm array). The length of read seems to be matching up quite well with 373/377 slab gels.
16CE's: weird number.But you can stick two 96 racks in the 3100 and it marches through 16 every 2.5 hours. Tonight we are doing two 64 lane gels worth. 20 hours. Start it right back up again. We don't own a 3700 but I have seen a lab or two struggle with it in a core environment. Blowing 96 samples (and that much polymer) made me hesitant to use a genome instrument for our number of samples. There are plenty of core labs who have done it and "if you build it they will come" their samples/year I'm sure have gone through the roof. I took a pass.
We are just figuring out stuff on this thing but except for a SFTTWNHA (stupid fluky thing that will never happen again) the 3100 worked right out of the crate. I've tried to load polymer, arrays, syringes as sloppily as possible and it works like a charm. Very easy to use.
NT sucks (I said it, now I feel better), but I have a Linux server that has a folder mounted on the NT and all our Macs. We just drop the extracted runs onto it and merrily edit, print, bill and email results from there. I do have to admit the NT is extremely fast at analyzing ( maybe 2 files a second) and it hasn't crashed yet.
Future: Currently we are using the 50cm array to get runs that are just a wiff shorter than a slab gel. (And this is subjective). A longer CE array is in the works. Longer runs, (and longer run time).
We're only in our first week of running real life core samples but almost everything about this instrument is giving me the warm fuzzies. Give us a a couple of weeks cranking up more data and I'll submit a better synopsis.
hope this helps, Paul
-- ____________________________________ Paul Morrison JFB216 paul_morrison@dfci.harvard.edu Molecular Biology Core Facilities Dana-Farber Cancer Institute http://mbcf.dfci.harvard.edu 44 Binney Street 617-632-3082 Boston, MA 02115 fax 632-4814 ____________________________________Chuiying Li-C-3 <li.c.3@pg.com> wrote: >We are planning to buy another sequencer and haven't make decision yet to buy >377 or 3100. We are looking for recommendations and comments about 3100 >especially on the one you currently use in your lab. > >Thanks and appreciate your help > >Chuiying Li >P&G Pharmaceuticals,Inc. >8700 Mason-Montgomery Road >Mason, Ohio 45040 >Ph: 513-622-1548 >Fax:513-622-3898 >
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