• Is cross-contamination a concern in your lab?

• Have you ever lost valuable sample in your laboratory homogenizer probe?

• Are you tired of wasting time cleaning stainless steel homogenizer probes?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions you should check out the Omni Tip™ Clear Plastic Homogenizer Probes. These probes are engineered from durable plastics and can process a wide variety of sample types.

The soft tissue Omni Tips are ideal for liquid homogenization, emulsifications and tissues such as liver and brain.

The hard tissue Omni Tips are ideal for kidney, heart, muscle, tumor, frozen and other similar tissue types.

Omni Tips are just as effective at homogenizing samples as their stainless steel counterparts, but they remove all of the hassle associated with stainless steel probes. Omni Tips are disposable, eliminating any risk of cross-contamination between samples during processing. However, Omni Tips can be reused if necessary. Their simple two-piece design makes them extremely easy to disassemble and clean.

It is no secret to researchers who homogenize tissue samples as part of their regular laboratory routine that the job can be messy and loud, and produce results that are sometimes inconsistent. To improve the laboratory work experience, we took a fresh look at the factors that matter most to those who use our homogenizers. These factors include sample processing results, repeatability, ease of cleaning, product noise, time, ease of use, product weight, reliability and environmental impact.This analysis resulted in the creation of the new Omni THQ lightweight handheld rotor stator homogenizer with Whisper Drive™ technology. Mechanical shear homogenizers, also known as rotor-stator homogenizers are the product of choice for most tissue homogenization applications. They generally consist of a motor and a processing probe called a generator probe. As a knife spins within the stator, it creates a pumping action that pulls liquid into the open end of the generator probe.

Bead Milling is one of the many technologies used for grinding, lysing and homogenization of laboratory samples. Bead Mills are typically used for samples that are difficult to disrupt with standard mechanical laboratory homogenizers. These sample types include tumor, heart, e-coli, yeast, bone, skin, cartilage, spores, seeds and soil. Bead Mills can also be used to extract nucleic acids and proteins and can be used with difficult to process cells such as cyanobacteria, mycobacteria, and microalgae.

Bead Mills employ very small glass, ceramic or steel beads. These beads are placed in a vessel along with the sample media. The vessel, beads and sample are vigorously agitated by shaking or stirring. Disruption of the sample occurs as the beads collide rapidly with the cells. A combination of the grinding beads and rotational effect produces a faster, more reliably effective lysing process for biological samples. Typically, a higher volume ratio of beads to cells produces a faster rate of cell disruption.

In case you haven’t yet heard, Omni International will be introducing the new THQ handheld laboratory homogenizer to the market within the next few months. This new product will have a brushless motor, digital speed control/readout, and will be OmniTip compatible. These features will reduce the amount of noise inside labs, and will allow a consistent processing of samples using plastic and stainless steel OmniTips.

This Rotor/Stator design homogenizes samples using a brushless motor. This allows the THQ to produce a sound level of 60dB at top speed, which is 15% quieter than most motor drives (but not as silent as your ninja lab partner). It also has a universal power input, accepting 115 and 220 volt power, and an optional external battery pack. This battery pack offers a 15 minute battery life at peak power, which allows it to be used out in the field for quick and efficient on-the-spot testing.

Designed to Save Time, Improve Yield, and Eliminate Cross-Contamination

by Karl Jahn

Rotor–stator technology is a highly efficient method utilized by many laboratories to homogenize, disrupt, emulsify, and blend a broad range of samples, including tissue samples. As a result, rotor–stator homogenizers are used whenever possible for most laboratory homogenizing tasks. Sample processing times are generally very short, homogenization is fast and efficient, and sample temperature rise is minimized or eliminated. First invented by Prof. Peter Willems in 1957, rotor–stator homogenizing remained relatively unchanged for nearly 35 years.

Plastic Homogenizing Probes

In 1992, Omni International, Inc. (Marietta, GA) invented the first plastic rotor– stator homogenizing probes, known as the Omni Tips™ (Figure 1). This marked the first significant improvement to this venerable technology and completely revolutionized rotor–stator homogenization (patent numbers 6,398,402 B1 and 6,863,431). Stainless steel homogenizing probes, still used in many laboratories, usually require a tedious cleaning step between samples.