[pmiguel]

bleach and tween with ddH2O. come on people, we are all educated here... or so I hope.

Hi Aniki,
Where did you come by that recipe, by the way?
Remember, most, if not all, presume you are an Illumina saboteur trying to lead innocent GS-FLX users off the Royal Path constructed for us by the benevolent research leaders inside Roche Applied Sciences.
--
Phillip

[Aniki]

it says so on their wash tubes, just not the concentration. I've called them about it and they won't tell me what concentration but did confirm that it was just bleach with water or tween with water, hence I asked in this thread the % of tween.

also if you guys want to really spend that 200 bucks please by all means do it.

[pmiguel]

You sound a little defensive there Aniki.

The issue is that Roche, for some reason, decided to produce these wash kits. Sure, maybe all ultra-pure water is alike and anyone can make solutions of bleach and tween. And maybe it is just a way for Roche to make a little cash, with no real benefit to their customers.

But diagnosing fluidics issues caused by biofilm growth or damage to the tubing or valves caused by using the the wrong concentration of bleach, sounds like a nightmare to me. So yeah, I'll pay the $200 penalty for not doing a run any given week.

You don't want to? Perfectly okay by me. You have likely weighed the risks and benefits and come to a conclusion. But comments like:

come on people, we are all educated here... or so I hope.

come across as, well, a little abrasive.

--
Phillip

[Aniki]

go buy the roche kits, please. I have nothing else more to say to you.

[pmiguel]

go buy the roche kits, please. I have nothing else more to say to you.

Well, ignoring your abuse, there is an issue to discuss here. Might not be the one you are interested in, but it does impact most of us. Generally, when working with complex instrument systems like the GS-FLX (and other sequencers), you end up buying in, to a greater or lesser extent, to the product ecosystem. Different companies have different attitudes and strategies in this realm. Roche does tend to have the most "all is forbidden" attitude towards straying from the path they set down.

There are some who feel comfortable cracking an instrument open and tinkering with it. While others refuse to make their own wash kits. You can pretend like there is only one obvious choice to make, but it is a judgement call.

--
Phillip

[rglover]

Personally, as I stated above, I would rather pay for the maintenance wash kits than have Roche refuse to fix a problem with our machine because we hadn't bought them. We had to fight for the money to buy our machine and if anything were to go wrong with it we need to have Roche support in fixing it.

So yes, we pay for maintenance kits and we pay for Roche product support, even though we know we could be throwing bleach and tween through it each week as a cheap alternative. As an analogy, having no car insurance is a cheap alternative - until you have a crash.

[yaximik]

Well, if one follows manual that suggests leaving the sequencer as is after a run, then one needs to stick to the recommended procedures and to use superclean maintenance kits. I happened to have interrupts in the usage of my GS Jr, so it was sitting without attention after a run for a week or so. When I opened the compartment next time, I was terrified by the abundance and colorfulness of life apparently prospering in the waste bottle. I normally work on an open bench with LB and very rare have bacterial/fungal contamination problems, so I wondered how all this life got into reagents presumably prepared in a super clean sterile facility? One can easily imagine what happens to delicate fluidics inside.
The second problem was that dried up reagents irreversibly modified the surface of metal plate facing the microreactors in the picotiter plate, which started to catch bubbles. Luckily, the intrument was still under warranty and it was replaced.
Since then, I always run maintenenace wash right after each sequence run using TE buffer to flush out any nutrients, and once a week with plain deionized water. It is cheap and very effective, and the instrument does just fine. One in a while I do maintenance wash, just to feel better. I bet, sippers can be maintained clean this way too, but I have not tested this idea yet.

[Dynamac]

Well said. Thanks, Phillip.

[cvr]

new FLX maintenance reagent kits to be kept frozen (-15 to -25)? seriously? is tween and bleach!! what a waste of freezer space, the boxes are even bigger than the sequencing reagents kit