amicas12

Sales reps were nice and convincing. Perhaps too convincing because the convenience functions are under weighed by their usability..

Strengths: Electronic programmable pipettors are great for staged tasks. It's like conducting a symphony where you orchestrate your moves from one sample to another. Beautiful equipment.

Needs to improve: No easy way to use the Viaflow pippetors if you have never used them before. Too many functions and buttons and no easy way to understand them all unless you flip through the manual. Who has time for that when you just need to pipette something. Plus the tips are all proprietary and you can't mix and match with other vendors. Unless your entire service department is using the same equipment, you're going to have to deal with a panopoly of consumables.

Volume discount pricing is available if you buy in sufficient quantities. Good service.

Strengths: Vistalab pipettors are definitely the most ergnomic ones we've used. They offer a full range of products from programmable to manual, small volume and large. They work well and for heavily repetitive maneuvers a reasonable choice in equipment.

Needs to improve: Annoyingly, tips are not interchangeable with other pipettors (no universal tip option). Cleaning of filters can be done yourself but it's easy to break pieces and equipment. Batteries are an odd size although now there are rechargeable options. Not sure if the ergnomics justify the price.

Sales staff was knowlegeable and support crew helped set and train our staff. They're always just a phone call away.

Strengths: Measurements of function are critical for preclinical trials and early validation in mammals. Columbus makes systems for monitoring mouse activity and coordination. We use the rotamex for testing multiple mice at a time and use their read outs to select and optimize our preclinical compounds.

Needs to improve: You need to buy into the system so its basically one system with lots of components. That might not work for you if you only want particular measurements, but we like the integration.

Great FAS helped us transition to Licor systems and did lots of t.raining with our staff. We appreciate the service and love the reps.

Strengths: Digital film chemiluminescence for western blots allows for more accurate quantitation of protein levels. Relatively clean, no hassel prep and does away with the bulky western apparatus, saving time and getting results faster.

Needs to improve: Weigh the cost of the system with the standard cost of a plain old western blot. Digital film is great but requires an investment in Licor hardware.

Free sample made our choice to go with Mirus simple.

Strengths: TransIT-X2 transfection is a unique transfection reagent. It's non liposomal that fires DNA or RNA out of the endosome and inot the cytoplasm upping the efficacy of transfection. Easy to use all-in-one type product.

Needs to improve: Lots of competing products in this space. You simply need to try them until you find one that works to your satisfaction. Nothing works in every situation.

Standard negotiations with a contract CRO are straightforward with breaks on increasing work.

Strengths: Make cloning easier. Instead of spending a month to clone your gene, just have Genescript synthesize it! This amazing service is staffed by quality CRO's who can knock out your gene or gene sets without you needing to pick up a pipettor.

Needs to improve: Unfortunately, they can't clone anything you can't. So tough genes, large genes, large genomes have no chance of being synthesized at the moment. Guess Criag Venter can keep tooting his own horn for awhile longer.

Convenience is fantastic, but unfortunately you pay a price. The read made gels are prepackaged and sold in sets and you need a Lonza kit to visualize them. It works well but it's just another device on your already crowded bench space.

Strengths: FlashGel systems work great for visualizing gels rapidly. The uniform band resolution allows for ultra sharp excision which is essential for when recovery of samples are rare or hard to obtain.

Needs to improve: While the FlashGel system is nice, it's doesn't improve workflow at all. Seems designed for bench scientists who are relatively unskilled at basic bench tasks.

Lots of products to help you with your research from antibodies to expression vectors and labeling reagents. Not anything you couldn't find anywhere else.

Strengths: Huge number of antibodies. If they don't have it, it may not exist! Also sports a large number of shRNA expression vectors.

Needs to improve: Unfortunately, their antibodies have high levels of cross re-activity or off target activity. We do not routinely use their mAbs for our protein studies because specificity is sometimes lacking. You don't want to burn time and money on something that doesn't work 100% every time.

Stellar design of candidate probes of interest for our diseases of choice. Domain expertise shines in their rapid turn around of candidates for our vetting. Great partner.

Strengths: Partnering with ISIS accelerated the pace of our development of RNA targeted pharmaceuticals. Their in house expertise in RNA silencing has been invaluable in developing workable target silencing probes for disease treatments and small molecule compound screens.

Needs to improve: Scientists are great, the business side is more confusing to deal with.

Relative to their competitors, OriGene antibodies in our hands have consistent outperformed other monoclonals.

Strengths: We love the huge selection of well validated cDNA clones. They accelerate the pace of research and release us from the constraints of engineering so that we can work on developing cutting edge science and drug discovery. Great search tool as well for ORFs and antibodies.

Needs to improve: Turn around time is sometimes a little longer than expected.

We prefer Fluidigm to the competitors.

Strengths: Fluidigm basically invented the digital PCR revolution. With microliter volumes and single molecule counting now possible, we use Fluidigm machines and chips to validate our hard-to-obtain clones. The offer a variety of other services as well as PCR machines, ranging from SNP genotyping to mass cytometry. The guys here know their analysis and business well.

Needs to improve: Use the Biomark machines judiciously since the cost of reagents and materials is not quite at the level of a qPCR. You can get higher sensitivity and percision, but use it only when you need it.

We love our Covaris machines. Service contracts are highly recommended. Tech support is good.

Strengths: We use Covaris sonicators for our NGS library prep because they give us the best results hands down. We have used every other method for Illumina sequencer prep lab work, but none have worked as well Covaris.

Needs to improve: They are loud! Dedicated room is a requirement.

We negotiated genotyping services for a genome wide association study and analysis of the results from their customized Illumina Omni Express arrays but all we got was raw data and no help and no further contact from 23andMe.

Strengths: High quality staff and research scientists know the ins and outs of analyzing genomic DNA from genotyping to ancestry mapping. 23andMe provided genotyping services for a collaboration of ours and returned high quality data.

Needs to improve: Communication between customer service reps and clients leaves much to be desired. We thought we were paying for 23andMe to provide genotyping and analysis services, but they simply returned genotypes to us with no analysis. We were greatly disappointed by their decision to push the raw data back to us without any further contact.

Excellent customer service, techs and scientists are working for this company. They'll help you figure out anything you need help with.

Strengths: For long read high throughput sequencing, the PacBio RS II is the way to go. Our collaborators have assembled microbial populations using long reads from a PacBio machine to generate scaffolds. The reliability of machines used to questioned routinely, but with this new iteration of sequencers those fears have been obviated.

Needs to improve: Previously, too much hype and too many problems plagued the original RS. PacBio is climbing out from under that morass of hyperbole and litigation with a product that works well.

Prices are comparable with others but delivery include installation costs

Strengths: Give Beckman centrifuges a spin! We recently replaced all the centrifuges on our floor with those from Beckman Coulter because of their excellent design, high quality and long lifetimes.

Needs to improve: Parts are hard to locate when you need them and can sometimes take weeks.

Great support with delivery, installation and training of our new Tecan system. They guys were knowledgeable about workflows and their systems so is was easy to get up and running.

Strengths: We variety of robotics and custom robotics to suit your needs. In our case, we wanted a high throughput machine to enable our technicians to perform next gen seq library prep as fast and efficiently as possile. Tecan provided our solution.

Needs to improve: Service contracts are onerous for labs with limited budgets.

They sent a few scientists to come around and explain their technology and occasionally offer test drives of their assay, although we did not take advantage of this.

Strengths: Novel technology for the detection and quantification of single cell RNA species. Impressive ability to detect and quantify transcripts from as few as one cell. Very useful in applications where rare transcripts or very abundent transcripts are the key targets.

Needs to improve: This is a well funded but still small start up company. They have their ups and downs as you will discover when trying to get orders or deal with tech support.

Not much to complain about although our Solid sequencer turned out to be less impressive than we anticipated and later exchanged that for a HiSeq.

Strengths: Life now includes the companies that were formerly Invitrogen and Ambion. RNA products are fantastic - we go through tens of thousands of dollars of RNAzap every year along with RNAlater for preserving RNAs from tissue and prefer Platinum Taq for most of our PCR needs. There's a huge catalog of things from Life and we have used many of them with great success.

Needs to improve: The mergers of multiple companies has made the product list occasionally confusing. It would be great if Life would discontinue market losers and promote the better product instead of providing every possible option.

Documentation with antibodies is stellar with Kd rates and notes to help you get it working fast.

Strengths: Top of the line antibodies for protein detection. We like their monoclonals for everything from westerns to IHC to Chip-seq applications. They don't always have an antibody for the protein you're looking for, but when they do it's got great affinity and works without much tweaking.

Needs to improve: They don't have the variety that another company like Santa Cruz might have, but their quality has been great.

Wide selection and affable customer support makes NEB a pleasure to work with. Replacement enzymes are shipped out quickly and they make efforts to be environmentally friendly by recycling shipping materials.

Strengths: Our scientists prefer NEB products for their work and if that's what they need and want, we get it for them. We use tons of restriction enzymes and the simplified buffer system used by NEB makes it easy to run reactions without having to deal with different buffers for each enzyme. Clearly the geniuses at NEB have gone through a lot of work to bioengineer quality product and simplify usage.

Needs to improve: Our interactions with NEB have been generally good. The only suboptimal experience commenced when their rep was too agreeable and then failed to meet deadlines. It didn't hurt us in the end but certainly frustrating at the time.