Question: Need recommendation for buying Spectrophotmeter - (Sep/23/2010 )

Our lab is looking for a new spectrophotometer. The old one is from Bio-rad, which has been iffy for a while. Any recommendations on spectrophotmeters that can measure 200-800nm, using cuvetts?

Thanks a lot!

It depends really, but I wouldn't go for cuvette based ones anymore.

NanoDrop is very popular if you have many people in the lab and want to do rapid measurements for RNA or DNA, but I don't recommend it for bacterial growth assays or protein measurement by Bradford.

For protein concentration assays we usually use microplate readers because we find it easier this way and we avoid multiple cleaning of NanoDrop that might damage the machine. For Bradford you need to have a standard curve every time you want to measure so it is really troublesome to use NanoDrop.

cathywill on Thu Sep 23 20:38:13 2010 said:

Dear cathywill,

I recommend that you buy a "spectral " rather than a "filter-based" spectrophotometer. You will lose a little with sensitivity but you will save time and money on buying new filters. I can recommend the molecular device range, like an M2e, which has many features:

You can still use a cuvette
It can do multiwell plates i.e. 6,12,24,48, 96 etc.
It is spectral rather than filter based
You can buy a spec. that can do multi functions depending on how much you have to spend i.e. absorbance, luminescence and fluorescence.

If you just want to do very small volumes and you are just quantifying DNA,RNA and protein, then the Nanodrop is perfect for that.

Hope this is useful.

Kindest regards.

Uncle Rhombus

A Nanodrop is amazing and I'm pretty sure they have a new version that can also read a cuvette.

Nanodrop all the way. Its cheap, versatile and fast!

Thanks a lot, everyone for your responses. I will check them out.