The Genomics Facilities Core located in Building 68-316 recently purchased (May 2017) a new fragment analysis instrument from AATI.  The FEMTO Pulse is a brand new instrument that provides a remarkable upgrade over the existing AATI Fragment Analyzer and Agilent BioAnalyzer technologies that have been available for many years.  While still an instrument to analyze the lengths of nucleic acids, the FEMTO Pulse adds a pulse filed generator to allow the separation and characterization of significantly longer molecules, out to 200,000 base pairs.  

                    Figure from AATI: 165 Kb ladder separated on the FEMTO Pulse Automated Pulsed-Field CE Instrument using the Ultra-Short Capillary Array (22-40)

                                                              Figure from AATI: Serial dilution of 300bp fragment on the FEMTO pulse

Additionally, the FEMTO pulse has significantly improved optics that allow several orders of magnitude of additional sensitivity.  Where the AATI fragment analyzer bottoms out a sensitivity of 2-3pg/ul, the FEMTO pulse has nearly 1000x improved sensitivity which may enable this instrument to directly observe molecular reactions without the need for amplification or modification with radioactive nucleotides.

For additional information of the Femto Pulse instrumentation, please contact Dr. Stuart Levine (slevine@mit.edu).