Rao:Tecan

Overview

The Tecan Safire2 is a multi-functional microtiter plate reader useful for the measurement of bulk absorbance, fluorescence and luminescence. In the our lab, we primarily use this instrument to measure bulk gene expression in live bacterial cells using fluorescence (fluorescing proteins) or luminescence (bacterial luciferase - Photorhabdus luminescens lux operon). Advantages of these systems versus traditional β-galactosidase (lacZ/bgaB) measurements include: i) the ability to correlate gene expression in bulk to single cell measurements (flow cytometry, quantitative microscopy) ii) the ability to make convenient time -course gene expression measurements under a highly varied set of environmental conditions.