Our BioAssay Facilities

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Cell Culture Laboratory

The Cell Culture Lab at the Nelson Mandela University is equipped with four Class 2 laminar flow hoods, a double incubator with temperature and CO2 control as well as a Luna cell counter. It is home to a large library of cell lines for biological assays including human, mouse, hamster and monkey cells.  

ImageXpress Micro XLS

The ImageXpress Micro XLS is a benchtop automated widefield microscope with high content screening ability cutting your experimental time significantly. It can hold up to 4 objectives with a magnification range from 1x to 100x and 5 filter cubes for multiple wavelength imaging. The system also features a robust high-speed laser autofocus which has multiple benefits including speeding up acquisition and reducing photo bleaching to your sample. The system also has a scientific CMOS camera with a larger field of view and a solid-state light source that increases the dynamic range of the system.

Hamilton Microlab STARlet

The Hamilton Microlab STARlet is our automated liquid handling system allowing us to pipette liquids into multi-well plates more accurately and efficiently. It has 8 CO-RE pipetting channels that can dispense 0.5 µL to 1000 µL reliably, consistently and precisely. It is equipped with a HEPA filter hood to keep the surrounding environment sterile. It also has a built-in heater and shaker system enabling more automation options. It allows scalable workflow automation and high throughput, complimenting the ImageXpress XLS Micro for high content analysis possibilities, saving us valuable lab time.

Zebrafish Breeding Facility

Our new exciting addition to the established cell laboratory facility is the zebrafish (Danio rerio) breeding facility (Ethics clearance number: A19-SCI-BCM-002). The zebrafish has gained intense popularity as a vertebrate in vivo model for the testing of a multitude of disease scenarios including a range of organ toxicities. It has been recently established that the level of biomedical organization of vertebrates such as fish are similar to that of rodents having only minor variations and at a molecular level, very few differences between human and fish have been found. Zebrafish eggs (up to 4 days post fertilization) can be used to test your product of interest.  

More Facilities

Beckman Coulter Cytomics FC500: This flow cytometer is an automated tube-based acquisition system equipped with CXP Analysis 2.1 software. Excitation using 488 nm or 633 nm lasers (single laser system) or both (dual laser system) is possible. Ten thousand events are normally recorded per sample and detected by customized photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). Five colours can be analysed using the FC500, which are recorded in 5 different channels (FLs) depending on the colour detected.   

Spectrophotometers, fluorometers and luminomiters: Our general post-graduate lab has several different multiwell plate readers that are used for end-point and/or kinetic colourimetric, fluorometric and luminescence assays that do not require image analysis.

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