£4,995 donation for a L20001 Luna FL Automated Fluorescence Cell Counter

Our £4,995 donation was spent by Eammon Maher, Head of the Department of Medical Genetics, Cambridge for a L20001 Luna FL Automated Fluorescence Cell Counter.

This was the thank you the charity received from Carl Spickett, post-doctoral researcher working with Eamonn:

“First and foremost a big thank-you to everyone for all your fundraising efforts and generous donations for Eamonn’s research. We had some discussion on how to make best use of your donation and decided to use the funds to purchase an automated ‘Luna FL’ cell counter for our work. The donation also covered the consumables for use with the equipment for at least one year.

I’ve included some pictures and thought I’d write a bit to describe how it is being used. As you can see it has really brightened up the cell culture room where our equipment is predominantly plain! The screen is extremely helpful for both demonstration and as a tangible way for us to discuss the findings as we get them in real time.

Our laboratory grown cells are counted on a daily basis to make sure we use the same number of cells for each of our experiments. We’ve found the new counter to be very fast and extremely accurate for doing this compared to counting by hand! In addition we are able to simultaneously check the health of our cell lines and measure their size accurately which is important for some of our experiments.

More specifically we extensively use kidney tumour cell lines to study disease progression. Since the cell counter is accurate over a range of cell types and shapes it is proving extremely accurate for use with these particular cells.

I hope this illustrates how this counter is not only extremely helpful for the specific applications of our work but also for the day-to-day tasks we need to do which are just as vital for our research.

Thanks again for all of your help on behalf of all of us using the equipment.”