Supply of an Automated Protein Electrophoresis System

Tender description

The Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) is Britain's leading industrial health and safety facility. Operating as an agency of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), HSL supports HSE’s mission to protect people's health and safety by ensuring risks in the changing workplace are properly controlled. HSL are inviting tenders for the supply of an automated system, electrophoretic or equivalent technology, for performing separation by protein size/molecular weight, visualisation and analysis of separated proteins, together with antibody staining of separated proteins (i.e Western blot). The new instrument will replace our electrophoresis tanks and power pack, blotting assembly and camera-based visualisation system with software. All these items are over 10 years old. Most importantly the purchase is necessary to make considerable saving in staff-time and improvements in the reproducibility of results for Western blots compared with our current system. HSL provides a range of analytical services to external customers which enable them to assess exposure to biohazards. Increasingly this included the development and application of antibody-based techniques for the detection of proteins and low molecular weight chemicals that are potentially hazardous to health. Therefore HSL is involved in the purification of proteins that need to be characterised in terms of their purity by electrophoresis (size-based separations) for uses both as standards and as antigens for raising antisera. Subsequent to antisera being raised, we characterise their ability to detect the protein of interest rather than non-target proteins by means of Western blots.