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Spectrophotometer Woes

There has been A LOT of whining about the spec in the lab and its lack of consistency in its O.D readings. Both Hal and I groan and grumble about it quite often… almost on a daily basis.

How can you be confident when you get a different number every time you spec your DNA? They aren’t consistent or predictable discrepancies either. Some times your DNA undergoes spontaneous PCR. Other times, the plasmid DNA must be contaminated with DNase. Since I don’t believe either of those two scenarios, the only *logical* explanation is that there must be something the wrong with the spec!

I wish the solution were that simple. The service man keeps assuring us the spec is reading his DNA standards just fine! How thoroughly frustrating!! Is it the spec? Us? The DNA? What? The frustration just keeps mounting.

Apparently, we’re not the only lab who has or has had this problem. One of our post-docs informed us what they nicknamed the spec in his old lab – the random number generator!

That name defines our spec perfectly.

Posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 7:01 am Categorized as:General

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5 Responses to “Spectrophotometer Woes”

  1. Caped Avenger Says:
    February 14th, 2007 at 6:43 am

    Harrumph. Why won’t comments work when not logged in?

    http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/labrats/2007/02/strobe_light.html

  2. Heather Says:
    February 15th, 2007 at 7:52 pm

    Not sure why you had to log in. Usually, you don’t have to!

    Maybe the site knew you were going to post a wise guy comment anonymously!

  3. Alethea Says:
    February 26th, 2007 at 10:27 am

    Hi! We get similar problems with the Nanodrop – so it’s not just the “traditional” spectrophotometers but also the latest high tech gadgets. It resolves more or less from time to time, but we don’t count only on that anymore. That, plus an Agilent bioanalysis – but that’s bloody expensive. When you have to, you have to; when you don’t, we take the spec measurements as a measure of order of magnitude.

  4. hwiegand Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    Oh boy. That’s not what I wanted to hear. We’re getting ready to check out a Nanodrop! We were hoping that would solve our problems.

  5. Caped Avenger Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    GIGO!

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