LabX

When a laboratory begins evaluating sequencing instruments, the list price is usually the first number that surfaces, and it turns out to be the least useful one in the purchase decision. A DNA sequencer price runs from $3,150 for a nanopore starter package to more than $1 million for a high-output production system, as of August 2026. Across platform families and sample volumes, the instrument purchase price typically accounts for well under half of five-year total cost of ownership.

Amsbio has launched a range of synthetic cell mimic controls through its SlingshotBio supplier partnership, offering an alternative to donor-derived peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), polystyrene beads, and cell lines used in flow cytometry quality control programs. The controls are available in off-the-shelf and customizable configurations, designed for consistent lot-to-lot performance with reported CVs as low as 0.1%, an extended shelf life, and no cell culture requirements.

While manual micropipettes laid the groundwork for modern molecular biology, the shift to electronic pipettes has unlocked a level of throughput, volumetric micro-precision, and operator independence that manual handling simply cannot achieve. Electronic pipettes allow programmable, multi-dispense cycles and controlled aspiration speeds that pull wash buffers without disturbing delicate magnetic bead pellets, making routine benchtop genomic sequencing reproducible across laboratories.

Microplastics in food have moved from an ocean-pollution story to a laboratory-testing one in only a few years, and testing programs are still catching up. Unlike pathogens, allergens, or mycotoxins, microplastics are not a single chemical entity with an established reference standard. They are a size and material class, spanning countless polymer types, shapes, and sources, which makes both sampling and quantification genuinely difficult.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have earned the nickname "forever chemicals" because their carbon-fluorine bonds resist breakdown in the environment for decades, and increasingly, that persistence is showing up in tests of the food supply itself. Testing for PFAS in food now spans seafood harvested near contaminated waterways, produce grown in PFAS-affected soil, and packaging that once relied on fluorinated grease-proofing agents, all documented sources of dietary exposure.

Milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame now make up the nine major food allergens recognized under U.S. federal law, a list that grew by one when sesame's labeling requirement took effect on January 1, 2023.

A single delayed test result can mean the difference between a routine batch release and a multistate recall. For decades, confirming the presence of Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, or Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) in food required multiday culture-based enrichment, leaving product in limbo or, worse, on shelves before results returned.

Mold does not need to be visible to make a crop dangerous. Aflatoxins, ochratoxin A, fumonisins, deoxynivalenol, zearalenone, and patulin are all produced by fungi that colonize grain, nuts, and fruit under specific conditions of heat, moisture, and storage, and several are known or suspected human carcinogens.

Food safety testing has become one of the most consequential quality assurance disciplines in food science. Each year, foodborne illness sickens an estimated 48 million people in the United States, sends about 128,000 people to the hospital, and causes roughly 3,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Behind those numbers is a testing infrastructure that has grown far more sophisticated than routine microbiology alone.

The Top 5 Pain Points of Manual Pipetting and How to Solve Them Moving beyond the old standard to a new realm of pipetting capabilities