A Safe, Accurate Method of Visualising Fluorescent DNA and Proteins

Syngene announces its innovative Blue Light Transilluminator light box for safe, precise viewing of fluorescently labelled DNA and proteins is now available.

Syngene’s new Blue Light Transilluminator does not need to be used in a darkroom, although it can be easily fitted into any Syngene image capture system. The transilluminator can illuminate dyes which emit light at 420-480nm, so is excellent for visualising nanogram amounts of non-toxic DNA stains including: SYBR® Safe, SYBR® Green, SYBR® Gold (Invitrogen) and GelGreen™ (Biotium),
as well as protein stains such as SYPRO® Ruby and ProQ® Diamond (Invitrogen).

The benefits of using Syngene’s Blue Light Transilluminator is that visible blue light is not damaging to the human eye and does not photo-nick DNA as UV light does. This means scientists can view, image and cut out DNA or protein bands from gels, on the bench, without worrying about harmful effects to themselves or their samples.

The Blue Light Transilluminator comes either with a 20cm x 20cm gel viewing area, ideal for most laboratory applications, or for scientists who need to visualise multiple gels or extra large gels, then a unit is available with a 25cm x 30cm viewing plate.

Laura Sullivan, Syngene’s Divisional Manager explained: “Many researchers want to use non-toxic DNA and protein stains because they are safe, as well as simple and inexpensive to dispose of. However, this has initiated a demand to find less dangerous light sources to view these dyes and we are very excited to have developed lighting equipment which perfectly meets this need.”

Laura added: “We have tested our Blue Light Transilluminator with SYBR Gold and GelGreen and have shown it can illuminate bands of as little as 0.01ng, with very short exposure times. The added bonus is the images produced using blue light are cleaner, with less background. We can now confidently say that scientists wanting safe, accurate gel analysis or to extract intact DNA and proteins from gels, should seriously consider installing a Syngene Blue Light Transilluminator.”