FLX Maintenance Wash

[Aniki]

Hey,

can anyone tell me what % tween20 is used in the maintenance wash.

thank you.

[crndy52]

Same as the bleach, 0.5%

[medical oncology]

What about the Sipper Tubes? Do you reuse them? Buy them separately?

[Dynamac]

Hey,

can anyone tell me what % tween20 is used in the maintenance wash.

thank you.

Are you making your own wash reagents?

[Aniki]

Sipper Tubes are changed every time I do a full sequencing run, but I reuse the same ones for maintenance washes. Also, yes I make my own washing reagents... it saves you quite a bit of money.

[Dynamac]

What about the Sipper Tubes? Do you reuse them? Buy them separately?

Each maintenance wash kit comes with sipper tubes and Roche discourages reuse. I agree with them; why risk contamination of the fluidics?

I'm not sure if you can buy them separately or not.

[Aniki]

you can buy the sipper tubes separately and they are a lot cheaper. As for contamination, I mean its 0.5% bleach for most of the fluidics except two which are 0.5% tween20. Use deionized water... I don't see any contamination going on here.

you are just burning your cash.

[Dynamac]

Sipper Tubes are changed every time I do a full sequencing run, but I reuse the same ones for maintenance washes. Also, yes I make my own washing reagents... it saves you quite a bit of money.

Interesting. I've toyed with the idea, what with the cost being about $200 per wash kit (quite a bit for Clorox and Tween), but I figure I'm spending the money for peace of mind, plus I don't have to prepare the solutions.

[Aniki]

you are burning your cash for nothing. A toddler can mix 5ml of bleach with 995ml of ddH2O. Saved you 199$ there.

[Dynamac]

How often do you do maintenance washes?

[Aniki]

you can do it once a week if you're bored, or just do it once every other week.

[MissDNA]

Roche recommends once a week if you don´t do any sequencing run. In our lab we have at least one run a week, so we don´t use a lot of maintenance kits. If we know we are not going to use the machine for a few weeks, we do the complete shutdown procedure. I agree the maintenance kits are overly priced for what they are.

[rglover]

We've been under the impression that if we have a problem with our 454 and Roche don't see that we've been buying maintenance kits they could refuse to fix the problem because we can't say we've been maintaining it as directed by Roche...

[pmiguel]

For what it is worth, an RAC told me that the Roche instrument wash kits are decanted/packaged in a clean room to avoid contamination with spores. This RAC said that people using home made kits had resulted in fluidics problems caused by biofilms forming.

Sound ridiculous on the face of it. But at least it could explain the high costs of the maintenance wash kits.

--
Phillip

[Aniki]

bleach and tween with ddH2O. come on people, we are all educated here... or so I hope.