Bio-Rad fixes our NGC

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE (situation Dec. 21st, 2024)

We just survived our protein purification course (DPDR-305, see also my other blog posts related to teaching . After having done about 25 runs with the “repaired” Bio-Rad NGC, I sadly have to conclude that the most significant issue remains: that the FPLC becomes unresponsive to commands issued manually. Also, the randomness of these disconnects persisted. Only one student group had problems, but we had several incidents during that single day. That, sadly, concludes our short stint into Bio-Rad territory for protein purification. All of this indicates that any further investments into this device will be wasted time and money. We have neither too much time nor too much money. If Bio-Rad wants to do anything from their own initiative, I am happy to let them do whatever it takes to get the machine into a usable state, but we won’t actively pursue any further actions.The best way to keep your FPLC device in good shape is to have a maintenance contract. Although we have been able to get money from our university to buy a top-of-the-line FPLC twice in the last 30 years, getting money for a service contract is much more difficult. One of the many reasons is that most grant periods are shorter than service contracts, which only make sense if you make them over several years.

Showdown: GE Healthcare's Äkta versus Bio-Rad's NGC

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have been purifying proteins since 1996. I worked on an Äkta Explorer until 2015, when we upgraded to the Äkta Avant . In 2020, my lab moved, and we inherited a Bio-Rad NGC , which we have been using now for 2 years.We encountered many problems with the Bio-Rad NGC. At first, I thought that this might be normal when switching systems. I expected the problems to disappear one by one. After all, we also had problems when we switched from the Explorer to the Avant.However, even after two years and dozens of purification runs, the problems with the NGC don’t seem to stop. Whenever ẃe solve a problem, a new, previously unknown problem appears. And differently to GE Healthcare, Bio-Rad’s customer service is not even close to what we have experienced with GE Healthcare. When our IT could not connect the Äkta to our university’s network, GE Healthcare sent an engineer from their Munich crew to Helsinki to fix the problem. Appreciating the learning curve, GE Healthcare also offered free participation in one of their courses for somebody from our team. And their support was not limited to the warranty period! They really wanted us to be happy with their device. We don’t experience the same amount of support from Bio-Rad. It always feels like we have to coerce them into solving the problems we have with the NGC, and their response time is well below any customer expectations.This is the first of several blog posts about Äkta versus NGC. I hope will find the time to write in more detail about all our issues over the next few months.We decided in 2015 that we finally needed a new FPLC. Our Äkta Explorer was reaching end-of-life, and we had received about 100k funding to renew the FPLC of our core facility . The device was expensive enough that we needed to go through the official tendering process (at the time, the limit was 30,000 €, but it has been increased to 60,000 € by now). There were only two contenders: The Bio-Rad Discover NGC and the GE Healthcare Äkta Avant. The Bio-Rad was cheaper (82,810 € versus 95,470 €), but we decided to purchase the GE Healthcare device. One important reason was that all our users had been using the Äkta Explorer and its Unicorn software. Switching would simply be disruptive and require lots of support and time from our side. However, there were also technical reasons that made us prefer the Äkta over the NGC:Äkta Avant’s advantages

NGC on Michael’s Domain

Bio-Rad fixes our NGC

Showdown: GE Healthcare's Äkta versus Bio-Rad's NGC