Review of GE Healthcare's Äkta Avant 25

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

About one year ago, we secured funding in an internal faculty call to replace the old Pharmacia Äkta Explorer 100 FPLC machine of the Protein Production and Purification core facility . The Äkta Explorer had been purchased in 1996(?) when the Swedish brand Pharmacia still existed. In 2014, the worse case scenerio happened and both monochromator and Xenon flash lamp broke almost simultaneously, which left us with a bill of almost 10000€. Hence we wanted to replace the machine with a contemporary model. There are only two companies offering serious devices in this space, which is GE Healthcare ( Äkta product line ) and BioRad ( NGC product line ). GE Healthcare inherited the Äkta brand from Pharmacia via multiple mergers, while BioRad is a relatively new contender with their NGC models, which they released only a few years back.We opted for the Äkta Avant 25 . We definitely wanted to have a cased, refrigerated fraction collector. And we wanted to have a familiar user experience. We often run automated purifications and we do not like our proteins to be for longer times at room temperature in open tubes into which bacteria and dust from the air can enter.By now, we have operated the Äkta Avant for about half a year and we have meanwhile a good idea how it compares to the Äkta Explorer. Even though the Avant is more modern than the Explorer, all users of our core facility still use the Explorer. They are familiar with the user interface of Unicorn 5.11 and seemingly have no interest in learning the - admittedly - more complicated UI of the Avant. But the other reason it was only in internal use so far was the fair amount of problems that we have encountered. With our old Äkta Explorer, we have never seen so many problems in such rapid succession. I don’t know whether our situation is typical (according to GE Healthcare’s representatives it is not). Nevertheless, here are the issues that we encountered:

Explorer on Michael’s Domain

Review of GE Healthcare's Äkta Avant 25