General Description: The VitroCutTM mechanical plant culture separator is Osmotek's answer
to the problem of how to drastically reduce the cost of cutting with in vitro culture
multiplication.
It operates on the principle that more than 85% of the material produced by random
cutting of highly branched, tightly clustered cultures, will usefully multiply in
further culture. The 15% or less of the material that does not is of no interest,
and does not compare to the economic savings resulting from reduced culture cutting
costs. The VitroCut is therefore ideally suited to cluster culture, or highly meristemic
cultures with little or no leaf.
The separator [800 750] consists
of three parts:
The main body and cutting arm, which holds the knife grid, and the anvil.
The knife grid,
[800 765], which is
a matrix of cutting blades held in a frame.
The anvil,
[800 760], which is
exactly mated to the knife grid, and pushes material through the openings. The anvil
has a patented, self-cleaning design, so that the grid and anvil do not become locked
by fragmented culture matter after several operations. See :VitroCut catalog
Cut plant material is allowed to fall directly into a sterile vessel placed below
the grid.
The entire VitroCut machine is autoclavable, and both the cutting head (anvil) and
the knife grid are easily removable for sterilization to prevent cross contamination
between batches of culture material. It is small enough to be conveniently operated
on a standard laminar flow bench, once sterilized. The machine is sold with two sets
of anvils and grid knives, so that one can be sterilized while the other is in use,
and spare knife grids and anvils can be purchased separately.
VitroCutTM has been proven in several laboratories to increase the production
efficiency of a single operator by a factor of 4-5X (4 - 500% increase). Even greater
efficiencies are possible with a pneumatic design, available on special order.
By clicking on the picture, you can see a series of frames which demonstrate the use
of the VitroCutTM device in a commercial laboratory, which is using it
with banana multiplication culture grown in the dark, in a LifeReactor bioreactor.
For this reason the culture appears white in colour. In this lab, membrane rafts are
used for the rooting and growth stage which follows, so that the culture is falling
directly into a vented vessel with a raft and liquid medium already present.
