Question: What is the most advanced piece of equipment you have ever used and what was it for?

David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 13 Mar 2019:

So, I had just typed: “The most advanced piece of equipment I personally used was (I think) a tomography electron microscope. These electron microscopes can take 3D images of what you’re looking at by slightly tilting the stage and taking multiple pictures that can later be reconstructed into a 3D image. ”
But then I went onto google to see how long different bits of equipment have actually been around for and realised that this technique is really old and has been around since the ’70s, the setup I used myself was probably from the early 2000’s.
So I’m afraid the most advanced piece of equipment for me was probably one really boring bit of equipment called a DNA Qubit, which measures the DNA concentration in your sample by sending waves of UV light through it.
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Somebody else in my lab group however recently used a really cool piece of kit (which I’m jealous of!) called a MinION nanopore which has been available since 2015. It’s so cool because it’s a really good new method of sequencing DNA. Previously, if you wanted to sequence a long DNA sequence, what you had to do is chop it up into little bits, sequence them all separately, and then puzzle them back together on a computer. With the nanopore, you can sequence a long string of DNA in one piece by passing it through a membrane which “reads” the different DNA bases by difference in electrical current.

The cool thing about the nanopore is also it is really small & portable, and just plugs into any laptop with USB so you can take it practically anywhere!