Cyclone Labs: Plasmid Preps Made from Your Own Constructs
A plasmid lab in New Hampshire that turns the constructs you already have into research- or transfection-grade DNA, now orderable on the Cypher AI Marketplace.
By Cypher AI ·
WHAT IS CYCLONE LABS?
Cyclone Labs is a plasmid preparation and custom cloning lab that makes research- and transfection-grade plasmid DNA from the constructs a lab already has. Cyclone Labs is based in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and serves labs across the Boston area. As of October 2026, its plasmid preparation service is listed on the Cypher AI Marketplace.
Cyclone Labs was founded by four scientists who spent years at the bench. Peter Cabeceiras, the CSO and a co-founder, holds a PhD in genetics from Harvard and leads construct design. The team started Cyclone Labs because plasmid DNA was too often expensive and late, and making it was busy work that pulled them away from their research.
WHAT PROBLEM DOES OUTSOURCED PLASMID PREP SOLVE?
Outsourced plasmid prep gives a team clean DNA in the amount it needs, without giving up bench days to maxipreps. Making plasmid in-house means growing large cultures, running the preps, checking purity and removing endotoxin, often for many constructs at once.
Take a cell biology team about to transfect HEK293 cells with eight expression constructs for a screen. The team has each plasmid as a few micrograms from a miniprep and needs about 500 µg of each. Eight maxipreps with QC would take days of bench time that the team would rather spend on the screen.
Bench time is only half of it. For a transfection screen, the DNA also has to be clean. Endotoxin is lipopolysaccharide left over from the E. coli that grew the plasmid. In a 1995 BioTechniques study, as endotoxin levels in plasmid preps rose, transfection efficiency fell across several cell lines. That's why transfection-grade preps set a tighter endotoxin limit.
WHAT CAN YOU ORDER FROM CYCLONE LABS ON CYPHER AI?
As of October 2026, Cyclone Labs lists one service on the Cypher AI Marketplace, called Plasmid Preparation. It has a fixed price of $35 and a turnaround of 3 to 5 days. On Cyclone's own price list, $35 is the entry size, a 5 µg research-grade prep.
Larger preps run from 100 µg to 10 mg, at research or transfection grade. A 1 mg prep is $210 at research grade and $290 at transfection grade on Cyclone's price list. To start an order, a lab sends plasmid DNA at 10 ng/µL or more. Cyclone banks the original plasmid for free, so a reorder doesn't need a new sample.
Every prep is checked against Cyclone's published QC thresholds. These include an A260/280 ratio of 1.7 to 2.0 and more than 80% supercoiled DNA. Endotoxin stays under 1 EU/µg for research grade and under 0.1 EU/µg for transfection grade.
Cyclone Labs also takes custom cloning projects, from gene synthesis through sequence-verified clones.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is the difference between research-grade and transfection-grade plasmid? Both pass the same purity, supercoiling and residual RNA checks. Transfection grade has a tighter endotoxin limit, under 0.1 EU/µg instead of under 1 EU/µg, which suits work in cultured mammalian cells.
How much plasmid do I need to send Cyclone Labs? Cyclone needs plasmid DNA at a concentration of at least 10 ng/µL. The original sample is banked, so you only send it once.
Can Cyclone Labs pick up samples in Boston? Yes. Cyclone Labs runs drop boxes in the greater Boston area with same-day pickup. Labs elsewhere ship samples to the Merrimack lab, and finished preps go back by priority overnight shipping.
HOW DO YOU ORDER FROM CYCLONE LABS ON CYPHER AI?
You can browse Cyclone Labs' listing at cypherbio.ai/services without an account. To place an order, create a free Cypher AI account. The service has a listed price, so there's no quote step, and you pay Cyclone Labs directly.
When you order from a Cypher AI project, the order records the project, ELN entry and LIMS samples it came from, so each prep stays matched to the experiment that needed it.