BioPulverizer, 0.1-1g

Description

The BioPulverizer quickly fragments hard frozen tissue samples into tiny pieces the size of grains of sand or course powder. The primary benefit of pulverizing pieces of tissue is to optimize subsequent rapid and complete cell lysis using lytic solutions or mechanical homogenizers. For difficult tissues such as tendon, skin, and tumors it is an essential step (see https://www.invitrogen.com/site/us/en/home/References/Ambion-Tech-Support/rna-isolation/tech-notes/isolation-of-total-rna-from-difficult-tissues.html). The BioPulverizer is also used at room temperature to fragment friable, dry biomaterial such as non-oily seeds, bone and teeth.

There are four different hand-operated BioPulverizers for quickly pulverizing 10 mg to 10 g of frozen tissue.

The BioPulverizer reduces tissue hard-frozen in liquid nitrogen to a fine powder. Because of the high water content, most fresh tissue becomes as brittle as glass at liquid nitrogen temperatures. A sharp blow with a hammer will shatter it into tiny pieces. Called freeze-fracturing or cryopulverization, the method is especially useful for preparing tough, fibrous tissues such as skin, cartilage, cornea, etc. for subsequent rapid cell disruption using other techniques. The Bio-Pulverizer consists of a hole machined in a stainless steel base into which fits a special piston, or pestle. In a typical procedure, up to 10 g of animal or plant tissue is hard-frozen in liquid nitrogen and placed in the pre-chilled BioPulverizer. The piston delivers a blow to the brittle tissue reducing it to powder.

Cryopulverization with the Bio-Pulverizer is also useful for extracting labile tissue metabolites. And, for affinity proteomics studies, cryogrinding with a bead mill such as our MiniBeadbeater is the preferred way to disrupt cells for recovery of native protein complexes