Oxford Optronix -Benchtop Physiological Oxygen Incubator and Workstation

In the field of tissue culture, there is a rapidly growing appreciation that a physiological cellular oxygen environment is essential for the analysis of cellular processes with respect to function and metabolism.

Rising to this challenge, Oxford Optronix has developed the HypoxyLab™ - a fully-featured, ergonomically engineered and easy to use normoxia/hypoxia workstation that provides a HEPA-filtered environment in which oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature and humidity can be precisely controlled.

In short, HypoxyLab™ is a compact hypoxia workstation and incubator for everyday use, suitable for applications including,

• Cancer, radiation and apoptosis cell biology
• Stem cell research
• Neurosciences research
• Human virology research
• Multidisciplinary drug development and proteomics

_{* 5-year manufacturer`s warranty is conditional upon annual preventative maintenance servicing}

True physiological oxygen (Physoxia)

As every scientist knows, it’s the partial pressure of oxygen that reflects the oxygen that cells actually ‘see’. The partial pressure of oxygen varies not only with oxygen concentration in the atmosphere, but also with altitude and prevailing weather conditions. We believe it is simply implausible to express hypoxia in terms of a (barometrically uncompensated) percent oxygen concentration alone. HypoxyLab is the world’s first and only hypoxia chamber that directly regulates its environment using the partial pressure of oxygen, expressed in units of mmHg or kPa, and is thereby insensitive to changing climatic conditions or the altitude of the laboratory. This scientifically rigorous approach enhances HypoxyLab`s accuracy and provides researchers with scientific certainty and the ability to replicate ‘real-life’ hypoxia in vitro at the highest level of accuracy achievable.

Rapid, efficient, accurate

HypoxyLab creates a fully humidified, stable hypoxia environment less than 20 minutes from switch-on and can deliver stable, near-anoxia conditions in under an hour, all while consuming surprisingly little nitrogen gas. Environmental conditions are delivered using digital gas flow controllers and state-of-the-art sensors for unrivalled performance with an oxygen accuracy of up to +/- 1 mmHg.

In situ dissolved oxygen from media and cultures

HypoxyLab supports the measurement of dissolved oxygen directly from media or cell cultures using any of our OxyLite™ oxygen monitors and a dedicated, sealable side-gland via which an OxyLite oxygen sensor can be fed into the chamber. Considered the ‘gold standard’ for biological applications, the OxyLite sensor is a tiny, highly accurate oxygen sensor that does not itself consume oxygen and that can be positioned anywhere within media or cell cultures to obtain continuous dissolved oxygen measurements. This provides a measure of oxygen availability in the microenvironment where cells are actually growing. Oxygen readings (in mmHg) can be read from the OxyLite display or can even be displayed and recorded by the HypoxyLab itself.

Live cell imaging

We have teamed with CytoSMART™ to offer the Lux2 digital microscope system, an extremely compact digital microscope solution that can be deployed within the HypoxyLab and is built to withstand long-term exposure to tissue culture environments. The system is supplied with software for installation on a PC kept outside the HypoxyLab and on which live cell culture images are displayed. The CytoSMART™ Lux2 supports time-lapse recording and cloud-based data access.