2006 Readers' Choice AWARDS

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Ask Laboratory Focus readers about instruments, techniques and services that they like and you get a remarkable cross section of answers. With feedback on a number of relevant questions we put to you, we found your answers overlapped in
a few key places.

You might therefore be tempted to say that means people do not agree on who gives you the best support or what piece of equipment stands up over time. However, it is more likely that these differences simply reflect how distinct various workplaces are from one another. Walk into someone else’s lab and at first glance it might look just like yours. Start checking, though, and you're bound to find that the people working there have an entirely different outlook, a workplace culture that might be very different from your own.

That's good news, by the way, because even if the two of you are working in the same field, approaching it in different ways means there is less likelihood that something will be missed. For just that reason, then, consider some of what people had to say on topics where you may still be considering your own opinion.
Topics such as:

What instrument is most reliable?
Perhaps the winning answer here was "the one with a simple design/concept", however, there were a number of brand names mentioned as well, especially when it came to pipettes, including Pippetman, 3M digital pipettor and Drummond Pipetboy. The Eppendorf and Perkin-Elmer thermal cyclers were also mentioned, as were gas chromatographs. This was also the first of many places that Varian and Millipore were cited.

Who gives the best tech support?
An interesting offer here consisted of "people, colleagues", implying that the best support is face-to-face, from people you know. Among organizations, however, Varian came up more than once and while 3M Perkin-Elmer, and Eppendorf came up again.

What is the most user-friendly equipment?
One respondent insisted self-made equipment fit this description, but the 3M digital pipettor and the Perkin-Elmer thermal cycler surfaced again. This query also prompted some people to cite companies such as Fisher, Qiagen and Sciex in a general way, rather than referring to any specific product.

What are your gotta-have consumables,
a kit or product you can't live without?
This list included such seemingly generic items as water, vials disposable gloves, sample containers, and a laptop computer, which perhaps means that what is most needed is not always the most complicated item in the lab. Some people do find some such items indispensable, however, including the Qiagen DNA purification kit, Invitrogen’s Taq Polymerase, Sarstedt microcentrifuge tubes and Abbot's Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay (ELISA) kit.

What is the best piece of
equipment for under $20,000
Simplicity was set aside here, as the Perkin-Elmer thermal cycler came up again, along with the Miele dishwasher and the Millipore Milli-Q Water system. Nor were more humble items forgotten, as the Pippetman and Mettler balance were both recommended again.

What is the most worthwhile splurge, among instruments over $100,000
Money seems to talk, especially when it comes to big-ticket items like HPLC and UPLC systems, along with microscopes and mass spectrometry equipment. Other popular price purchases included the Cameca SX100 Electron Microprobe, the Applied Biosystems 7500 Real-Time PCR System and the MegaBACE 4000, which can handle some 384 samples simultaneously, generating more than 2.8 million bases in a day.

What is the most valuable online resource
Google was bound to get at least a couple of votes, but so too did Dolphin Software, for handling Material Safety Data Sheet (http://www.dolphinmsds.com/), and multinational giants like 3M (www.3M.com) and Fisher (www.fishersci.com/). And perhaps topping the good, basic "gee-whiz" category is the interactive periodic table, http://www.chemicalelements.com/.

What equipment or product generates the best word-of-mouth buzz:
The buzz was quite varied, although 3M's Petrifilm came up repeatedly, as did Taq polymerase/Restriction Enzymes, which were earlier voted a "gotta have it" item. Pipettors remained a crowd-pleaser, as did the Leitz Confocal Microscope, the Zeiss EVO series of scanning electron microscopes, and the X-Ray Diffraction system from Panalytical.

What is the best time-saving instrument, product or lab tip
Pipetting came to the fore once again, with electronic repetitive pipetting technology appearing to be quite popular. Meanwhile, there were a number of common sense recommendations that would do Martha Stewart proud including "keep different projects separated by different coloured plasticware", "it really doesn’t matter if your cell culture medium is not at 37C before use, since room temp is usually fine for most cells and there’s no point leaving it for an hour in the water bath," and this bit of advice from a morning person: do all difficult jobs as early as possible in the day.

What is your favourite lab clean-up tip
Common sense and Martha continued to rule, as respondents suggested using disposable instruments for messy jobs, cleaning up messes as soon as possible, wearing gloves or simply using as few resources as possible in order to minimize any disruption. Some suggestions were highly technical, such as using 70 per cent ethanol solutions or VWR green bags to remove ethidium bromide from liquids which can then be disposed. Meanwhile, some options smacked of administrative cunning, including hiring a summer student for cleaning, holding a Friday afternoon clean-up party or the ultimate exercise of authority — delegate it.

Tell us your favourite
lab joke
These were no less varied than the observations, and assured us that people can see the lighter side of even the most highly technical matters. Consider these examples:

Do you know the joke about the abberarions? They were tested by phase stepping inferometry but they never encoded the wavefront as a hue scale.

What do policeman get paid that work the night shift? Copper nitrate.

If you are not part of the solution, then you must be the precipitate.

What do you call the big iron ride at the Circus? A Ferrous Wheel.

And what may be the most nefarious answer to the question of clean-up:

A creative mass is better than clean idleness!