REM e for more than two-lane plates

[flxlex]

Hi,

I previously started a thread on the REM e module for emPCR Enrichment here: http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2916, but decided to start a new for this question.

We now have the REM e running on the Hamilton, and it seems to work. However, we had to go through a lot of rounds with 454/Hamilton to get the protocols for 4-lane, 8-lane and 16-lane plates installed. We have been told nobody uses the REM e for 16-lane plates. Is this true? Are we the only crazy ones who are still doing this? Or rather, were doing this (we just decided to run 8 lanes max).

[kmcarr]

flx,

We don't have a REM e but we completely stopped doing 16 region gaskets simply for practical reasons. They leak terribly and the loss of usable picotiter plate wells is simply too great. We will occasionally do 8 region runs for a submitter doing amplicons (he submits 8 multiplexed pools at a time) but otherwise stick to 4 or 2 region runs, using multiplexing to combine more samples. Multiplexing is far more efficient than running the multiple region gaskets.

[flxlex]

Sure, we mulitiplex. But the 16 lanes were for amplicons, just like your 8 lane runs. We just informed our biggest user of 16 lane runs, and they are a bit pissed because of the necessary redesign we now force upon them in the middle of their data collection. Need to talk to them...

But leaky 16 lane gaskets is not something we experience...