Barcodes are one of the best ways to track and trace items. They’re found everywhere, in supermarkets, industrial warehouses, labs, and medical facilities. However, barcodes didn’t just appear out of nowhere; a lot of time, effort, and hard work went into their initial development. Here’s the story of how they were first designed and patented more than 70 years ago.

Appropriately identifying patient specimens is of critical importance to pathology labs. The College of Pathologists previously evaluated the average cost of labeling errors at approximately $280,000 per million specimens, adding up to over $1 million dollars a year for some of the larger institutes.¹ Specimen labeling errors also result in the failure to provide proper and immediate care for patients, which can severely harm the patient, resulting in unnecessary morbidity and mortality.² 

Employing mammalian cell lines is crucial in life science research, especially with new, more relevant models of disease engineered with induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Here, we’ve come up with some basic tips to help culture cell lines, regardless of their source.  

We’ve reached the end of 2019, which is the perfect time to look back at everything that happened throughout the year at GA International. From new products to a brand-new website, GA has seen significant growth since 2018, including the establishment of new facilities, newly hired personnel, and winning several awards along the way.

Everyone’s had their run-ins with contamination in the lab. There are two main types of contamination—biological (bacteria or fungi) and chemical—both of which can easily ruin your day, making cell cultures unusable and skewing your experimental results. Below, we’ll review many of the ways you can avoid spreading contamination throughout your lab. 

With new artificial intelligence (AI) technology primed to revolutionize medicine, including diagnostics and drug discovery, it was only a matter of time until scientists decided to use AI to solve the question no one has yet been able to answer: why do we age at all?

The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) recently held their second Sample Management Symposium in Boston, MA. I was there on behalf of GA International to cover some of the new trends in sample management being implemented in biotech and pharmaceutical companies across North America.

Labs have been using cryogenics for years to store human and animal tissue samples, cell lines, and extracts. Freezing ultimately helps preserve these samples, but for large organisms, freezing can be lethal. Here, we’ll review the current state of knowledge about what happens when we freeze cells, the strategies scientists use to help tissues and organs survive the freezing process, and how nature has adapted to cope with freeze/thaw cycles.  

Working in the lab can be both creatively inspiring, allowing you the ultimate freedom to plan, execute, and test your own experimental theories, and extraordinarily restrictive.  Lab space is always an issue, especially for small labs that use large equipment, such as HPLC machines and mass spectrometers.

While thermal printing has been around for decades, there are still many myths surrounding thermal labels. With so much riding on the proper identification of your samples, it’s important to get the facts straight when choosing your labels. Below, we’ve listed some of the most common misconceptions about thermal-transfer printing and addressed why these statements are inherently false.