About Life Sciences

Reichert Inc.'s entry into the design and manufacturing of Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) instrumentation began with collaboration between Leica Microsystems (Reichert Inc. predecessor) and Cornell University starting in mid-1997.  This collaboration spearheaded efforts to incorporate biosensing technology into Reichert's core critical angle refractometer products.  This technology built upon a key Reichert Patent (US Patent #4,640,616, Automated Refractometer, 1987) describing a digital reflected light refractometer incorporating a charge coupled device to sense reflected light intensity over a range of angles covering a refractive index range from 1.33 to 1.52.

Basic technology described in this patent was utilized to construct Reichert's first single channel SPR device, the SR6000, first sold in 2000.  A subsequent version, the SR7000 introduced in early 2003, incorporated features such as greatly improved signal to noise, lower volume fluidics and electronic temperature control.

In mid-2006, Reichert Inc. introduced and began selling a two channel SPR Spectrometer, the SR7000DC.  This instrument features two channels (experimental and reference) improved signal to noise, lower baseline drift, and vastly improved optics, electronics and computing power.