Life of a Lab Rat

No, not the video place that is taking teh intaweb by storm.

'Eppendorf' tubes. You may remember I was wibbling about sub-standard tools of the trade. The Greiner rep did indeed show, and was appropriately chastened. I got a free replacement box of 8-tube strips (which appear to be all right) and a sample of eppendorf tubes made by Molecular BioProducts.

These seal all too well, and are difficult to open. Allegedly they fail with phenol/chloroform, but I have not had that problem. Even so I was not over-impressed, until I was introduced to another rep (hello Dan!), this time from PLP. Despite the coloured liquids on their front page they're actually reasonably knowledgable and give the impression of being very customer focussed.

I spoke with the rep and he promised to bring me some samples of Axygen tubes and filtered tips (no, that's not cigarettes, they are pipette tips that have a filter in them to prevent carry-over of materials through aerosols). And a couple of days later he turned up with a bag of eppendorf tubes and four or five boxes of filter tips. Yes Hal, that's a whole bag — about 100 tubes.

And you know what? These tips are bloody good (low-retention plastic! [swoon]) and the tubes are ideal. Clear plastic, nice seal to them yet easy to open, no worries with phenol/chloroform and pretty boil-resistant too. The one thing that makes them less than perfect is that the plastic also appears to be low-retention, which means you don't lose sample because it has stuck to the tube but also means DNA/RNA pellets do not stick to the bottom so you have to be extra careful after an alcohol precipitation.

But I can live with that. Dan says that the price they (as distributors) will sell the tubes at is much less than the parent company wants, which is good news for us. Now to persuade our purchasing people that we should be stocking them in Stores.