A shaker is a piece of laboratory equipment used to mix, blend, or agitate substances in a tube or flask by shaking them. It is mainly used in the fields of chemistry and biology. A shaker contains an oscillating board that is used to place the flasks, beakers, or test tubes. Although the magnetic stirrer has lately come to replace the shaker, it is still the preferred choice of equipment when dealing with large volume substances or when simultaneous agitation is required. [1]
Invented by Jack A. Kraft and Harold D. Kraft in 1962, a vortex shaker is a usually small device used to shake or mix small vials of liquid substance. Its most standout characteristic is that it works by the user putting a vial on the shaking platform and turning it on; thus, the vial is shaken along with the platform. A vortex shaker is very variable in terms of speed adjustment, for the shaking speed can be continuously changed while shaking by turning a switch. [2]
A platform shaker has a table board that oscillates horizontally. The liquids to be stirred are held in beakers, jars, or Erlenmeyer flasks that are placed over the table or, sometimes, in test tubes or vials that are nested into holes in the plate. [3] Platform shakers can also be combined with other systems like rotating mixers for small systems and have been designed to be manufactured in laboratories themselves with open source scientific equipment. [4]
An orbital shaker has a circular shaking motion with a slow speed (25-500 rpm). It is suitable for culturing microbes, washing blots, and general mixing. Some of its characteristics are that it does not create vibrations, and it produces low heat compared to other kinds of shakers, which makes it ideal for culturing microbes. Moreover, it can be modified by placing it in an incubator to create an incubator shaker due to its low temperature and vibrations. [5]
An incubator shaker (or thermal shaker) can be considered a mix of an incubator and a shaker. It has an ability to shake while maintaining optimal conditions for incubating microbes or DNA replications. This equipment is very useful since, in order for a cell to grow, it needs oxygen and nutrients that require shaking so that they can be distributed evenly around the culture. [6]
Anyone employing an incubator shaker (thermal shaker) to grow yeast or bacteria in the laboratory needs to beware that under the usual conditions encountered in the lab, the rate at which oxygen diffuses from the gaseous phase into the shaken liquid phase is too slow to keep up with the rate at which the oxygen is consumed by, for example, E. coli dividing every half hour or Saccharomyces cerevisiae dividing every hour. If the investigator measure the oxygen in the shake flask on the shaker -- polarographically, for example -- at mid-exponential phase of growth, the dissolved oxygen concentration will turn out to be zero.
In physics, cryogenics is the production and behaviour of materials at very low temperatures.
Mixer may refer to:
An Erlenmeyer flask, also known as a conical flask or a titration flask, is a type of laboratory flask which features a flat bottom, a conical body, and a cylindrical neck. It is named after the German chemist Emil Erlenmeyer (1825–1909), who created it in 1860.
Laboratory glassware refers to a variety of equipment used in scientific work, and traditionally made of glass. Glass can be blown, bent, cut, molded, and formed into many sizes and shapes, and is therefore common in chemistry, biology, and analytical laboratories. Many laboratories have training programs to demonstrate how glassware is used and to alert first–time users to the safety hazards involved with using glassware.
A test tube, also known as a culture tube or sample tube, is a common piece of laboratory glassware consisting of a finger-like length of glass or clear plastic tubing, open at the top and closed at the bottom.
Liquid nitrogen—LN2—is nitrogen in a liquid state at low temperature. Liquid nitrogen has a boiling point of about −195.8 °C (−320 °F; 77 K). It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. It is a colorless, low viscosity liquid that is widely used as a coolant.
A microbiological culture, or microbial culture, is a method of multiplying microbial organisms by letting them reproduce in predetermined culture medium under controlled laboratory conditions. Microbial cultures are foundational and basic diagnostic methods used as a research tool in molecular biology.
In industrial process engineering, mixing is a unit operation that involves manipulation of a heterogeneous physical system with the intent to make it more homogeneous. Familiar examples include pumping of the water in a swimming pool to homogenize the water temperature, and the stirring of pancake batter to eliminate lumps (deagglomeration).
Laboratory flasks are vessels or containers that fall into the category of laboratory equipment known as glassware. In laboratory and other scientific settings, they are usually referred to simply as flasks. Flasks come in a number of shapes and a wide range of sizes, but a common distinguishing aspect in their shapes is a wider vessel "body" and one narrower tubular sections at the top called necks which have an opening at the top. Laboratory flask sizes are specified by the volume they can hold, typically in metric units such as milliliters or liters. Laboratory flasks have traditionally been made of glass, but can also be made of plastic.
Cell disruption is a method or process for releasing biological molecules from inside a cell.
A vortex mixer, or vortexer, is a simple device used commonly in laboratories to mix small vials of liquid. It consists of an electric motor with the drive shaft oriented vertically and attached to a cupped rubber piece mounted slightly off-center. As the motor runs the rubber piece oscillates rapidly in a circular motion. When a test tube or other appropriate container is pressed into the rubber cup the motion is transmitted to the liquid inside and a vortex is created. Most vortex mixers are designed with 2 or 4-plate formats, have variable speed settings ranging from 100 to 3,200 rpm, and can be set to run continuously, or to run only when downward pressure is applied to the rubber piece.
An incubator is a device used to grow and maintain microbiological cultures or cell cultures. The incubator maintains optimal temperature, humidity and other conditions such as the CO2 and oxygen content of the atmosphere inside. Incubators are essential for much experimental work in cell biology, microbiology and molecular biology and are used to culture both bacterial and eukaryotic cells.
Round-bottom flasks are types of flasks having spherical bottoms used as laboratory glassware, mostly for chemical or biochemical work. They are typically made of glass for chemical inertness; and in modern days, they are usually made of heat-resistant borosilicate glass. There is at least one tubular section known as the neck with an opening at the tip. Two- or three-necked flasks are common as well. Round bottom flasks come in many sizes, from 5 mL to 20 L, with the sizes usually inscribed on the glass. In pilot plants even larger flasks are encountered.
A wash bottle is a squeeze bottle with a nozzle, used to rinse various pieces of laboratory glassware, such as test tubes and round bottom flasks.
A glass stirring rod, glass rod, stirring rod or stir rod is a piece of laboratory equipment used to mix chemicals. They are usually made of solid glass, about the thickness and slightly longer than a drinking straw, with rounded ends.
A water bath is laboratory equipment made from a container filled with heated water. It is used to incubate samples in water at a constant temperature over a long period of time. Most water baths have a digital or an analogue interface to allow users to set a desired temperature, but some water baths have their temperature controlled by a current passing through a reader. Utilisations include warming of reagents, melting of substrates or incubation of cell cultures. It is also used to enable certain chemical reactions to occur at high temperature. Water baths are preferred heat sources for heating flammable chemicals, as their lack of open flame prevents ignition. Different types of water baths are used depending on application. For all water baths, it can be used up to 99.9 °C. When temperature is above 100 °C, alternative methods such as oil bath, silicone bath or sand bath may be used.
Test tube racks are laboratory equipment used to hold upright multiple test tubes at the same time. They are most commonly used when various different solutions are needed to work with simultaneously, for safety reasons, for safe storage of test tubes, and to ease the transport of multiple tubes. Test tube racks also ease the organization of test tubes and provide support for the test tubes being worked with.
In microbiology, the term isolation refers to the separation of a strain from a natural, mixed population of living microbes, as present in the environment, for example in water or soil, or from living beings with skin flora, oral flora or gut flora, in order to identify the microbe(s) of interest. Historically, the laboratory techniques of isolation first developed in the field of bacteriology and parasitology, before those in virology during the 20th century.
Laboratory drying rack is a pegboard for hanging and draining glassware in a laboratory. It is available in different varieties and sizes. It can be used for different materials of glassware in the laboratory room such as funnels, pipettes, mixing balls, slides, bottle stoppers, tubing and so on. In addition to that, the pegs on the drying rack are easily removable and replaceable in order to maintain the cleaning of the lab racks to avoid contamination with other apparatus used on the same rack. Any common laboratory needs to have at least two or three drying racks per lab.
A cell suspension or suspension culture is a type of cell culture in which single cells or small aggregates of cells are allowed to function and multiply in an agitated growth medium, thus forming a suspension. Suspension culture is one of the two classical types of cell culture, the other being adherent culture. The history of suspension cell culture closely aligns with the history of cell culture overall, but differs in maintenance methods and commercial applications. The cells themselves can either be derived from homogenized tissue or from another type of culture. Suspension cell culture is commonly used to culture nonadhesive cell lines, plant cells, and insect cells. While some cell lines are cultured in suspension, the majority of commercially available mammalian cell lines are adherent. Suspension cell cultures need to be agitated and may require specialized equipment or flasks. These cultures, like all cell cultures, need to be maintained with nutrient containing media and cultured in a specific cell density range to avoid cell death.