qe: re-use of electroporation cuvettes

[Rob Kirkpatrick]

In article <Pine.HPP.3.96.980107111806.12040B-100000 at hydra.U.Arizona.EDU>,
Harold E Smith <hes at U.Arizona.EDU> wrote:

> Dear Kirsten-
> We regularly reuse these cuvettes.  To clean, we simply rinse with
> deionized water, then 70% ethanol, and invert to dry.  The cuvettes are
> then sterilized by UV exposure.  We use the Stratalinker from Stratagene,
> but a standard transilluminator works just as well.
> -Harold

I didn't see the original post for this one so I'll add a note to this
one.  We also re-use our electroporation cuvettes.  We used to clean them
in a very similar manner as described above until we started getting alot
of contaminating plasmids (i.e. UCO's - Unidentified Cloning Objects). 
Then we changed our protocal to clean these.  Now we rinse with a forced
spray of distilled water, then when we have enough, we soak them in a 0.3%
bleach solution for one hour, rinse them again, invert to dry and
UV-sterilize them.  We dropped the ethanol step altogether because the
bleach seems to do a fantastic job.  

Happy cleaning!

Rob

Rob Kirkpatrick
Dept. of Human Genetics
University of Manitoba

remove the ??'s in e-mail address to reply