Driving multiple pulsed field electrophoresis devices from one personal computer

A PC has been programmed to control more than one pulsed fieldelectrophoresis device (e.g. clamped homogeneous electric field,CHEF; field inversion gel electrophoresis, FIGE). Each deviceis assumed to have a field controller requiring signals to (i)switch the field on/off, (ii) re-orient the field and (iii)invert the field. An interface between the computer parallelport and up to four devices is suggested and this was builtfrom stan dard TTL logic and optical couplers. Software hasbeen written to drive all four devices in parallel. Each pulsedfield device may have a totally independent pulse regime, maybe stopped or started at random and may be monitored at anytime during an experiment. Setting up and running each deviceis almost entirely by mouse control and frequently used pulseregimes may be saved and rapidly retrieved from hard or floppydisk. The software can be configured for any combination ofCHEF and FIGE devices.