Gene Editing (CRISPR)

Buying guide

This set spans the full width of the catalogue, so the price range is wider than any single category shows. Listings run from EUR 1 to EUR 400.457. The low end is reagents and the molecular tools that carry a construct, along with the cuvettes and small consumables that the delivery step gets through quickly. The high end belongs to the readout: a DNA sequencer or a sorting flow cytometer is where the capital sits, and an automated liquid handling deck configured for an arrayed screen lands in the same bracket. An electroporator falls between the two, nearer the lower end as a bench instrument than as a high-throughput system.

Condition tilts heavily toward used: 98 percent of the listings are used. For the readout instruments that matters most, since a sequencer or a cytometer bought at the used price is where the saving against new is largest. The catalogue distinguishes new and used only, so condition beyond that is a question for the individual listing.

Because this work buys across categories rather than within one, the first decision is which stage to equip first. A lab already able to deliver and confirm gains more from a sorter than from a second electroporator, and the reverse holds for one that can read but not yet reach its cells. Where warranty matters on a given instrument, it is arranged in consultation for that specific listing.

Types of Gene Editing (CRISPR)

This work pulls on several classes of instrument at once: electroporators and the genome editing and molecular tools that carry the construct, imaging systems and flow cytometers for sorting, DNA sequencers and PCR equipment for confirmation, and automated liquid handling where the screen runs at scale. Gene editing, or CRISPR, is not one procedure but a chain of them, and the stages below run roughly in the order a protocol follows them. Each stage names the equipment it leans on and where it binds the stage after it.

How does the construct get into the cell?

Delivery is where the method stands or falls, and it is the step most sensitive to the cell type. Electroporation is the common route for lines that resist chemical transfection: a field pulse opens the membrane long enough for the ribonucleoprotein or plasmid to enter. The pulse that works for a hardy immortalised line will lyse a primary T cell, so the equipment here is judged on how finely the waveform can be set rather than on throughput alone. The genome editing and molecular tools category covers the reagents and the delivery hardware that pair with this step.

Where the target is many lines at once, as in an arrayed screen, delivery moves onto automated liquid handling. That shifts the bottleneck: a deck that dispenses into hundreds of wells still needs each well electroporated, so the two have to be matched in format or the gain is lost at the transfer.

Confirming the edit landed

A cut is invisible until it is read, and two instruments do the reading at different depths. PCR equipment amplifies the edited locus for a first pass, enough to tell whether cutting occurred at all. DNA sequencers then resolve what the repair machinery actually did, the indels, the knock-in, the off-target events that a gel cannot show. The order matters: amplifying the wrong region wastes a sequencing run, so primer design on the PCR side constrains what the sequencer can confirm.

For edits that change a surface marker or a reporter, flow cytometers read the population directly and quantify what fraction carries the change. This is faster than sequencing and answers a different question, how many cells rather than exactly what, so the two readouts sit side by side rather than one replacing the other.

Which cells made it through, and are they alive?

An edit is only useful in cells that survive it, and recovery is its own stage. Imaging systems track the culture after delivery, reading viability and expression over time rather than at a single endpoint. Where the edited cells have to be separated from the rest, flow cytometers sort on the reporter and pull out the fraction that took the change, which is also how a clonal line begins.

This is the step that loops back to the first. A delivery setting gentle enough to preserve viability may lower the editing rate, and an aggressive one raises the rate while thinning the survivors. The imaging and sorting instruments are what make that trade visible, so the readout at the end informs how the delivery at the start is set the next time round.