BioSpec BioPulverizer

Overview

The BioPulverizer reduces tissue hard-frozen in liquid nitrogen to a fine powder. Because of the high water content, most fresh tissue becomes as brittle as glass at liquid nitrogen temperatures. A sharp blow with a hammer will shatter it into tiny pieces. Called freeze-fracturing or cryopulverization, the method is especially useful for preparing tough, fibrous tissues such as skin, cartilage, cornea, etc. for subsequent rapid cell disruption using other techniques. The Bio-Pulverizer consists of a hole machined in a stainless steel base into which fits a special piston, or pestle. In a typical procedure, up to 10 g of animal or plant tissue is hard-frozen in liquid nitrogen and placed in the pre-chilled BioPulverizer. The piston delivers a blow to the brittle tissue reducing it to powder. Freeze fracturing with the Bio-Pulverizer is also useful for extracting labile tissue metabolites.

How The BioPulverizer Works

1. Place the BioPulverizer in a shallow container and cool thoroughly with either liquid nitrogen (preferred) or a dry-ice/alcohol mixture (next best).
2. Place prefrozen tissue in the well of the mortar.
3. Remove the mortar from the shallow container, place it on the lab bench and pulverize the tissue with one or two blows to the pestle with the hammer. The mass of the stainless steel will preserve the cold long enough for you to complete your pulverization without adding additional liquid nitrogen.
4. Empty the powdered contents for subsequent homogenization or extraction procedures.

There are four different hand-operated BioPulverizer for quickly pulverizing 10 mg to 10 g of frozen tissue:

• 10 - 100 mg capacity BioPulverizer  
• 0.1 - 1 g capacity BioPulverizer
• 1 - 10g capacity BioPulverizer
• MultiSample BioPulverizer, 12 wells, 10 - 100 mg per well*

*Twelve pestles are included with each MultiSample BioPulverizer.

Please Note: The BioPulverizer is for pre-crushing prior to homogenization (either using a lytic solution or a homogenizer).  Use of the BioPulverizer alone will not be sufficient to obtain a highly homogenized sample.

Manufacturer Specifications

• Type 316 stainless steel.
• Four sizes available.
• Hammer provided.
• Requires access to dry ice or about 200 ml of liquid nitrogen.

FAQ

What are the well dimensions for the BioPulverizer?

The dimensions are as follows:

• 59012N / 59012MS - 0.375" diameter, 1.40" depth
• 59013N - 1.25" diameter, 1.50" depth
• 59014N - 1.75" diameter, 1.25" depth

It doesn't sound like the 59013N and the 59014N are all that different in size. Does one really have an order of magnitude higher capacity than the other?

It may not sound like a half inch makes that big of a difference, but you can tell when you see them in person, side-by-side. The well of the 59014N BioPulverizer definitely is not a full order of magnitude larger than the well of the 59013N, but it is a lot larger, as you can see in the image below.

59014N is on the left, 59013N is on the right. The mortars may not appear all that different in size, but you can see the difference more clearly if you look at the difference in size of the pestles when they are side-by side (in the bottom middle of the image).

That said, could you process a sample larger than 1 gram in the 59013N? Yes, you could process a 2 gram sample and possibly a 3 gram sample.