High purity water specialist, Veolia Water Technologies, has installed laboratory water purification systems at the National Institute for Health Research’s National Biosample Centre in Milton Keynes.
The £24m Centre, managed by UK Biocentre on behalf of the University of Oxford and the NIHR, has the capacity to store up to 20 million biological samples, and provides laboratory facilities for research into treatments for conditions such as dementia and diabetes.
The NBC facility has several laboratories, each requiring two grades of water: Type II water for general laboratory applications such as media preparation and buffer solutions, and
ultrapure Type I+ water for critical processes including DNA/RNA extraction, sequencing, and tissue sample preparation.
The two largest laboratories each require up to 100 litres per day of Type II water, with a maximum instantaneous demand of 70 litres/hour. Veolia installed a PURELAB Option-R 15 in each laboratory to provide Type II water, which is then polished to Type I+ water by using PURELAB Ultra Genetic Units. In the other laboratories the demand is lower, at 40 litres per day, and purification to Type II water is undertaken by using a PURELAB Option-R 7 with a PURELAB Flex 2 to provide final polishing to Type I+.
