Driving multiple pulsed field electrophoresis devices from one personal computer

A PC has been programmed to control more than one pulsed field electrophoresis device (e.g. clamped homogeneous electric field, CHEF; field inversion gel electrophoresis, FIGE). Each device is 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 parallel port and up to four devices is suggested and this was built from standard TTL logic and optical couplers. Software has been written to drive all four devices in parallel. Each pulsed field device may have a totally independent pulse regime, may be stopped or started at random and may be monitored at any time during an experiment. Setting up and running each device is almost entirely by mouse control and frequently used pulse regimes may be saved and rapidly retrieved from hard or floppy disk. The software can be configured for any combination of CHEF and FIGE devices.