Pipetting, contamination....

[Tom Anderson]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Jose de las Heras wrote:

> "Tom Anderson" <ucgatan from ucl.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:mailman.5.1171950975.5139.methods from net.bio.net...
> > On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, Gaelle ayyildiz wrote:
> >
> >> would u please tell me how i can pipette my regents without
> >> contaminating them with the micropipette (i.e. Gilson pipette)?
> >
> > Filter tips are an easy and effective way to avoid contamination, but
> > normal good pipetting practice shouldn't result in a great deal of
> > contamination.
>
> However, spending many hours working in the radiation room illustrates
> how easy it is to get your pipettes contaminated. No matter how careful
> you are, aerosols are formed at some point. That's why we ended up using
> filter tips as standard for any radioactive work. When your solution is
> not radioactive it's just not so easy to detect, but even the most
> careful researcher's pipettes get contaminated if they don't use filter
> tips.

Quite true - if you're doing something really sensitive, like
radioactivity, qPCR, or RNA work, then filter tips are a must. Also for
biohazards - i always use filter tips when i'm doing virus work, and in
some labs i've worked in, filter tips were standard for all tissue
culture.

tom

-- 
Tom Anderson, MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, UCL, London WC1E 6BT
(t) +44 (20) 76797264   (f) +44 (20) 76797805   (e) thomas.anderson from ucl.ac.uk