Electrophoresis gel boxes and geldoc system - (Jan/21/2010 )

Hello,
I'm looking around for a good quality (rugged) midi-sized gel box (15x10cm gel sizes) to do some cloning, PCR etc. I'm also wondering about solutions to hook up a cheap but effective CCD with a UV-illuminator. What cameras work with the Biorad's Quantity One software? Oh, will be nice if I can avoid UV. Are there any blue LEDs that work very well with sybr dyes? Thanks a million for any suggestions.
I have a $1K budget, btw.

You can get blue light boxes that will work fine with Sybr dyes. I think you will find that only the Biorad products will work with the drivers in the Quantityone software, but it is relatively cheap to rig up a small camera with a fixed focal length for this sort of work - all you need is a dark case with the camera fixed to the top, that you can move onto and off the light box (like this one). It will help if you can get a filter for filtering out extraneous light wavelengths. Be aware that UV will damage most cameras unless you have the appropriate filter.

I quite like OWL scientific gel running stuff - available from Thermo Scientific and other distributors (apparently, having just had a quick google for it).

I was looking at the literature for the BioRad QuantityOne software and it said that .tiff files can be used on the program. So as long as the you can export or convert your image to tiff then most camera should work.

We use Alpha Innotech hood (old style, just a plastic funnel to cover the UV source and a mounting position for the camera) and an Olympus camera with UV filter (purchased from a camera store). This unit has been working without problems for years.