NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Biotechnology Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, suffered a power outage lasting 36 minutes last month while it was performing real-time PCR runs, quantification, and capillary electrophoresis separation tasks, coordinator Walter Goldstein said this week.
Goldstein said a power surge caused by the outage “fried” some of the lab’s computers, but did not damage his lab instruments, among them sequencers made by Applied Biosystems, because the labs had auxiliary power-protection tools installed.
The UNLV lab has had a few outages, Goldstein sad, but added that because of the backup protection he has not suffered any instrument damage beyond computer hardware, or any loss of samples.