We recently installed two cryopreservation storage vessels at the Francis Crick Institute: Mill Hill Laboratory in London. The vessels have a new twistable canister inventory system and the CryoFill control unit, and can contain up to 40,000 samples each.
The Crick is one of the world’s leading biomedical research institutes and is dedicated to understanding why disease develops, and to finding new ways to treat, diagnose, and prevent illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, infection, and neuro-degenerative disease. The institute is a consortium of six of the UK’s most successful scientific and academic organisations - the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust, University College London, Imperial College London, and King’s College London.
The Genetic Manipulation Service (GeMS) at the Mill Hill laboratory, led by Sarah Hart-Johnson, are the laboratory’s transgenic and cryopreservation core. GeMS is primarily a transgenic unit specialising in the production and maintenance of transgenic animal models. Cryopreservation is a vital tool in the management of GA lines as it provides a back up to live colonies, preserves valuable models, and minimises genetic drift over long periods of time, whilst reducing the need for large numbers of live animals. Frozen germplasm is stored at -196°C in liquid nitrogen, allowing virtually no decay or aging of the cells. GeMS has one of the largest frozen embryo and sperm archives in the UK, holding over 2000 rodent lines as well as many aquatic lines. The unit uses Planer controlled rate freezers and a number of Planer storage vessels.
The GeMS team will soon be moving to the new site of the Francis Crick Institute at St Pancras in London, and in preparation for the move researcher Josephine Mankelow has updated the facility to meet the demands of an expanding cryopreservation program. The unit previously stored approximately 25,000 straws across nineteen MVE XC47-11 tanks, which were transferred into two large MVE-1426 vessels. Straws are now stored in daisy goblets within new twistable canisters which allow access to the goblet needed by only opening the section of the canister required. As goblets are stacked on top of each other, the new design reduces the risk of exposing top goblets to ambient temperature whilst retrieving samples from the bottom of the stack.
More at
https://www.crick.ac.uk/
http://planer.com/products/storage-vessels/large-vessels/mve-series.html
http://planer.com/products/ivf-racking.html