Biokeystone is the expert of advanced bio-coating technologies. Based on expertise of leading scientists, engineers, and state of the art facilities, Biokeystone has established as the leader of coated German glass coverslips for a variety of challenged primary cell culture and primary neuron cultures. You will find full line supplies of sterile German glass coverslips in different sizes and thickness being professional coated with poly-L-lysine, poly-D-lysine, collagen, fibronectin, laminin, or gelatin.

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MCI: Microfluid Neuronal Culture

How can our Microfluid Culture Insert make your neuron culture robust?

The Problem:

Serious problems occur in most traditional cell culture systems. For instance, conditioned culture medium is essential to many cell types for optimal growth and responsiveness, but typical large volumes of culture medium dilute the concentrations of secreted cell factors and thus significantly slow down and de-potentiate the life events of the cells in culture. In contrast with in vivo environments, free bulk flow of culture liquid perturbs local chemical gradients, which may impair signaling and disturb cell behaviors. Resulting assay data may be weak, excessively variable and potentially misleading.

The Solution:

Using micro-fluidic design and engineering strategies, Biokeystone has developed MCI, a new model for cell culture technology. With MCI, the free flow of culture medium can be substantially eliminated, stabilizing local gradient profiles of factors secreted by cultured cells. At the same time, the volume of immobilized culture medium surrounding the cultured cells is reduced several hundred fold, which enables rapid accumulation of secreted factors to high levels, accelerating cell establishment, growth, differentiation, or maturation accordingly. If needed, cells can be cultured successfully at very low density. This innovative culture system more nearly mimics in vivo conditions for effective cell signaling and responsiveness, unlike what one sees in traditional  culture systems.

6Mgel: Run high-speed gel in dd-Water

As shown below, 1x running buffer, a highly conductive liquid, has two functions in conventional submarine agarose gel electrophoresis: keeping the agarose gel cooled and conducting electric current. To avoid gel overheating, the volume of running buffer should be as large as possible. But more buffer conducts more electric current, which generates more heat. So buffer volume should be as small as possible. Which is correct - more buffer or less buffer?

The principle of the 6Mgel invention

The inventor recognized that deionized water is the best and cheapest coolant. The electrical resistance of lab dd-water is 18MΩ, which means that dd-water is an excellent electrical insulator. By simply adding dd-water directly on top of a TBE agarose gel, the desired effects are achieved: gels can be run much faster!  You can add a large volume of dd-water to dissipate heat so that a much higher voltage can be applied to drive faster migration of DNA molecules. Band "smiling" is eliminated because the large volume of dd-water in direct contact with the gel maintains even heat distribution. Also, sharper banding occurs due to "stacking effects of dd-water in gel wells.

In 6Mgel, the V/cm in wells is elevated about 3-fold higher than in the gel body, which drives DNA 3 times faster in wells than in the gel body, resulting in sharper bands. Furthermore, there is no running buffer consumption.

The strength of 6Mgel is particularly significant for Genotyping and PCR applications, where high percentage agarose gels are usually required. It takes longer time for sample molecules to migrate through the concentrated gel body. 6Mgel innovation has solved the problem.