High tempo temperature control – How heating blocks make our lives easier

The days of splashing around in a water bath seem to be numbered as heating blocks rapidly move into the laboratory.

In biomedical research, temperature control of samples is an everyday procedure. Almost every test protocol involves at least one step where a certain temperature must be maintained. Whether its a simple enzyme digestion, the denaturation of proteins, nucleic acid hybridization or, more recently, isothermal amplification – many of today’s methods use heating blocks as the standard means of temperature control.

Superior to a water bath

While just a few years ago we still cooked our “incubation soups” in wather bads, many laboratories have now switched to using heating blocks for such procedures. First of all, this is much more hygienic, because various microbiological processes can develop in water baths over a long period of time, which, depending on how often they are cleaned, can have some unpleasant consequences. Replacing water as a temperature control medium also has some important advantages. For instance, any desired temperature can usually be reached in just a few minutes. Modern dry heating blocks, for example, can heat at speeds of 5°C per minute. This enables samples to be heated after a 15-minute warm-up phase. The aluminium heating blocks can then be exchanged quickly and flexibly, and a fresh, even lower target temperature can easily be configured. One could only dream of achieving such rapid temperature adjustments using a water bath.

Thermoblocks are universally interchangeable

However, the option of replacing aluminium heating blocks has other applications beyond just rapid temperature changes. This method also lends itself to other possible uses. For example, there are already blocks suitable for centrifuge tubes, PCR tubes, microtiter plates, PCR plates and cuvettes.

Temperature regulation accurate to a tenth of a degree

In addition to the properties already mentioned, heating blocks are a very precise means of regulating temperature. Digital devices, for example, will deviate less than a tenth of a degree when set to a target temperature of 37°C. High-quality block thermostats also offer the convenient option of quickly measuring a reference sample with the help of a temperature sensor. This makes it easier to carry out temperature-sensitive procedures such as thawing cultures or melting point analyses.




The latest thermoblock trend is an integrated shaking function. This means samples can not only be heated in a controlled manner, but also mixed at the same time in a shaking dry bath. As a result, dry bath incubation is being used more and more, and increasingly displacing the water bath.