Temperature-controllable and oxygen-free french press system

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A temperature-controllable and oxygen-free French Press system is capable of rapidly disrupting microbial cells non-invasively under anaerobic conditions.  It provides a nearly complete breakage of small cells (>90% with one pass) compared to other methods such as sonication (~50%). Currently, there is no such system for cell disruption in the Department of Biology at the University of Waterloo.  We propose to purchase a temperature-controllable and oxygen-free French Press system to aid in the purification and characterization of oxygen-sensitive enzymes from hyperthermophilic microorganisms and yeast cells.  This system can also be used for other types of cells, such as bacterial and other eukaryotic cells, and it can handle sample-volumes from 1 to 35 ml depending on the need and cell availability. The proposed temperature-controllable and oxygen-free French Press system will speed up oxygen-sensitive enzyme sample preparation procedures, resulting in more efficient use of resources and reduced training time, and will accelerate research progress, thus increasing quality of our training programs at the University of Waterloo.