S35 thermal cycler contamination

[Annette C. Hollmann]

I have never had to clean up a thermal cycler, but have decontaminated 
other equipment such as microcentrifuges, block heaters, and micropipetters.
For recent contamination, I use 20% v/v PCC-54 in warm water, the warmer the
better (but don't boil it). For tough hot spots, I use 33% PCC-54, 33%
warm water, and 33% Ethanol.

PCC-54 is a detergent available from Pierce. It takes off hot spots that
Contrad won't even diminish by 10%. Now they also have PCC-54 plus, but I
wouldn't recommend using that on sensitive surfaces. I only used the plus
version once, and it softened my outer pair of latex gloves - but at least
it completely erased the hot spot that normal PCC-54 couldn't remove.

Annette
ah690549 at mbcr.bcm.tmc.edu