Costs etc for a project in plant/interactions (nectar chem.)

[Stevesteve]

Hi,

Please excuse my lack of experience with HPLC. I am interested in doing some work on the influence of nectar chemistry on the behaviour of ants.

I have some protocols from previous studies but can anyone here give me any idea about the likely costs of analysing nectar samples for:

* Sucrose:fructose:glucose ratios.
* amino acids.

Many thanks,
Steve

[Rndirk]

Do you want to know the cost of these analyses at a private lab, or the investment or buying the instruments yourself?

[Stevesteve]

Ah... very good point.

Assuming that the hardware is in place I was just trying to get a ballpark figure (to put together a budget plan) for the costs of consumables and reagents necessary to run the analyses.

Regards
Steve

[HPLC chemist]

When I ran a contract analytical lab many years ago, I would put an HPLC on a low flow rate and charge $100 per hour waiting for promised samples to appear. The highest cost of an HPLC IS not running samples! It's a workhorse!

[lmh]

The answer will depend enormously on who does the work. If you're in a university somewhere and you can find a collaborator, also in a university, the costs will possibly be an order of magnitude lower than if you get it done by a contract analysis company (because universities care about their academic output and can balance their equipment costs against their teaching income, while a contract analysis company can only stay afloat if it covers all of its costs from every job). Also, exactly how a job is costed depends on who's paying; if you're applying for grants from national research bodies, some will allow rates that include depreciation of instruments, others will not.
In effect: don't ask here, look around at the people who you can actually get to do the work (academic collaborators, contract labs), and ask them. That way if you are lucky and get the funding, you're guaranteed to have someone who'll do the job for the price. Also your application will look stronger because you'll have shown practically that it's possible and well thought through.
Remember also that if you're in academia, have basic lab equipment but not hplc, and want to do sugars, there are good spectrophotometric methods available for glucose, fructose and sucrose.