Red Rain and washing plates

[richard]

Kevin,

I think it all depends on what the water is like where you work. My 
daughter did a jr. high school sci project by analyzing various water 
supplies around the Boston area and discovered that the tap water in 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, had a pH of ca. 8.25! and the [F] was almost 
off scale. An HPLC trace of the same sample looked like a profile of 
the Rocky Mountains.

But still, we don't have to go to extremes in plate washing either. I 
suppose our destiller does a good job. We've noticed green haze type 
problems disappear when we replaced a slightly cracked cassette with a 
new one and also, another time, when the service engineer realigned the 
laser. 

We don't need the paper towels either, just the "cling" wrap )at the 
bottom) and avoiding excessive prerunning.

Dick Cook,
MIT






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Ah! At last! Someone like me who doesn't go in for all this obsessive 
acid
cleaning business. I'm always reading posts to this group that say 
things
like 'you must HCl wash your oplates every 2 days', 'alconox clean the
buffer tanks', never use this, always do that.......

I use any old alcohol thats going to wash my plates, I only ever rinse 
out
the buffer tanks with normal tap water, I have cloudy 10x TBE and my 
gels
run perfectly, I get great reads, I get little or no gel haze. Does all
this acid cleaning just lead to more problems or am I just lucky? I 
dont
think its luck cos I havn't won the lottery yet :-(

Kev

Kevin Clark                    |
kclark at immsvr.jr2.ox.ac.uk     | If you havn't seen God, you're not
Institute of Molecular Medicine| driving fast enough.
Oxford,UK.                     |