Steve-
A few years back (2-3) Gary Salzman, at Los Alamos, designed and built a
small transportable cytometer for the Army, with BioRad as the industrial
partner. The Army wanted a small, rugged instrument (that could be carried
around in a Humvee) to be used to detect biological warfare agents. The
cytometer was fairly successful in a generic way - I don't know exactly how
well it worked as far as the Army was concerned and I don't know what
BioRad did with the instrument design. Gary's machine was, in some ways,
competitive with the "Brite" but not long afterwards the company stopped
making that instrument as well. You might want to contact Gary Salzman
directly at: salzman@nis.lanl.gov . There are more nifty detectors now
than ever before: miniature PMTs, APDs, etc., as well as many data
acquisition options such as National Instruments' wide variety of cards for
PC and MAC platforms (including laptops) and LabView software to control
the cards has become pretty sophisticated and versatile. It probably would
not be trivial to build a very small and rugged instrument {with one or two
solid-state lasers, two or three fluorescence channels and forward light
scatter} but conceptually it's not too difficult and there are many slick
components now to make the task much easier.
Robb Habbersett
At 05:26 PM 2/9/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear Flow persons
> This relates to the interesting question of Lin Xiaohua, Tropical
>Marine Science Institute
>National University of Singapore.
>
> Is there somewhere/anywhere by what company, a small and portable
>flow cytometer that could be packed and taken along on a trip to a highly
>untechnological part of the world (e.g., jungle) and be used "in the field"?
> Thank you all for your thoughts on this matter.
>Steve
>
>***************************************************************
>** Stephen L. Gaffin, Ph.D. **
>** Research Physiologist **
>** Military Nutrition & Biochemistry Div **
>**US Army Research Inst for Environmental Medicine **
>** Natick MA 01760-5007 USA **
>** **
>** Tel. 508-233-4867 Fax 508-233-4869 **
>** Stephen.Gaffin@na.amedd.army.mil **
>***************************************************************
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