ANON POST: Modern day clinical lab equipment?

[kutsuwamushi]

My main character is a doctoral researcher at a very well-funded private clinical lab (I don't have a medical specialization for her yet, in part because of the question I have, but it would be something biochemical based) in a contemporary setting. I'm having the hardest time figuring out what kind of equipment would be present (cold rooms? TEM

Comments

[anonymous_bosh]

When I was working as an assistant in the biochem labs at Michigan State U. we were trying to figure out particular cell pathways (passage of water through cytochrome c,) so there were quite a lot of chemicals for shutting down specific cell pathways. The ones that stopped oxygen and water getting into tissue cells probably wouldn't do much to a full-sized human being, but the ones that messed with sodium reuptake in neurons would do a number on someone, and various fluorides and acids in a blocked fume hood will look like an accident and could potentially do awful things to an entire lab.

Other things we worked with: liquid nitrogen, and sometimes liquid helium, for fast-freezing cells. Ethyl and methyl alcohols. Large fragile glass beakers. Variously sized syringes for getting chemicals into vials. Sonic stirrers. Cell presses and cold cultures and cell crystallization/microphotography setups, in the cold room, and if she's not wearing much and got locked into the cold room she could probably get cold enough to die. If someone bumps her cells as they're crystallizing, she'll just get very annoyed.

In the lab itself were fume hoods for working with chemicals, several enormous very full freezers, the huge shelves full of chemicals and the other shelf of various beakers, shaking incubators for growing the cell cultures in, and centrifuges. There was an emergency shower and eyewash station, desk-bookshelf areas for each of the people who normally worked in the lab, a separate office for the head of the lab, stations for specialized tasks like using the sonic stirrer or setting up petri dish cultures, and, for a while, a huge and very complicated titration/crystalization setup. It looked a lot like a vending machine with an inside full of vials set into gears and clear plastic tubing running all over.

Oh, and every few days I'd take the cleaned and emptied cell-growing flasks up to the autoclave for sterilization. It was big enough to shove a small person into, and I'm pretty sure anyone doing research with cells rather than animals would need one of those or a dry heat sterilizing oven.

http://www.who.int/vaccines/en/poliolab/webhelp/Chapter_04/4_1_Working_in_the_cell_culture_laboratory.htm And this might give you some ideas.