 The purpose of this video is to familiarize you with the laboratory centrifuge and its operation and how to operate it safely. And I'm also going to be showing you various types of centrifuges. The laboratory centrifuge operating it is a basic laboratory skill. There are hundreds of different types of centrifuges for hundreds of different purposes and they all kind of have various design features and characteristics. And we'll look at some of those. And I would speculate that most biotechnology laboratories have some capability for some type of centrifugation. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of different types of centrifuges, they have a common element in their function in that they're basically a motor which drives a spindle on which is attached the rotor and then the rotor would have our samples on it and these would spin and as they spin the increasing amount of force as the rotor spins puts force on the tube. You can see this is a swinging bucket rotor and as the rotor begins to spin the buckets actually swing out into the horizontal position from the resting position of vertical so that the force being applied actually would be centrifuging and paliting the material into the bottom of the tube. And so and that's the purpose of the centrifuge to apply this force to sediment the materials to about now remember that we're talking about centrifuging suspensions as opposed to solutions. We've talked about solutions where the material we have a solute dissolved in the solvent in the term of a suspension the particles are suspended in the solution but they're not or suspended in the liquid but they're not dissolved in it so that it's the gravity force of gravity applied by the centrifuge on these particles will cause them to proceed toward the in this case the bottom of the tube.