30 Year Commitment for Professor Tom Riley

Professor Tom Riley from Pathwest Laboratory Medicine and The University of Western Australia has been a committed Don Whitley Scientific customer for over 30 years. In the past few years he has installed two A35 Anaerobic Workstations into his lab to replace a Whitley MK III Workstation that had given him over 20 years of reliable performance.

Professor Riley started using anaerobic workstations over 30 years ago when the capacity and time consuming operation of jar gassing systems was deemed unsuitable for the number of samples he had. Tom explained to Don Whitley Scientific how he came to use Whitley Workstations. “My original anaerobic chamber from a manufacturer in Australia (that doesn’t exist anymore) was hopeless.”. The next option for Professor Riley was a Whitley MKIII Anaerobic Workstation, which served his lab for over 20 years, and was the first Whitley Anaerobic Workstation in Australia. His two Whitley A35 Anaerobic Workstations currently play a part in work that Professor Riley explains as “almost exclusively research into Clostridium difficile. This includes everything from diagnostics to pathogenesis and epidemiology”.

Although the MK III provided a reliable anaerobic environment for such a long time in Professor Riley’s lab, there are new benefits provided by the A35 Anaerobic Workstation that Tom finds particularly useful, such as the Instant Access Porthole System and Letterbox entry. The Instant Access Porthole System is unique to DWS, allowing entry to the chamber in seconds without the need of gloves or sleeves. Letterbox entry allows the user to introduce Petri dishes and similar small items into the anaerobic workstation environment in no time at all. As aforementioned, Tom also needed extra capacity to process a large number of samples. Compared to using the MKIII or anaerobic jars, the main chamber of an A35 Anaerobic Workstation will accommodate between 400-600 x 90mm Petri dishes depending on whether plate carriers are used, which accessories and system options have been incorporated and how much working space is required.

The space and reliability provided by Whitley Workstations has served Professor Tom Riley well for over three decades now. He is part of a long list of satisfied Whitley Workstation users around the world, who are all doing fantastic work with Don Whitley Scientific products.

Recent papers from the Riley lab are listed below