Shelf life

[ScottC]

Hi All,

What is the oldest kit that anyone has used? Do you see a drop-off in output quality and/or quantity with kits that have been in storage for a while? We're contemplating a large order simply because it's significantly cheaper that way, but I'm a little worried about how well they keep (so far, we've only ever used kits that are used within a week or so of their arrival).

Cheers,

Scott.

[swbarnes2]

Older reagents

We had a badish run, and the first thing Illumina told us was that our reagents we older than the shelf life. Not by a lot either (and no one had told us that the shelf-life was so short!), less than 6 months.

So if your reagents are old, and you have a problem, Illumina will tell you that you have old reagents, and to just run again with fresh ones. Not a big help.

Because of that, we haven't dared to try any runs with old reagents.

[ScottC]

Hi,

Thanks for the info. How old were the reagents?

[SCurB]

I have used kits at least as old as the shelf life (3 months) and possibly as old as 4 months and had them work fine.

However, I probably wouldn't want to push your luck given the price of these kits.

[andibody]

I suppose we are talking about the Sequencing kits.
What about the others, sample prep and cluster gen kit? They should in principle have a much longer shelf life.
Mostly Enzymes and buffers at -20C...

[kwebb]

Does anyone have any recent experience with older kits/reagents? What is the oldest kit that has been used successfully?

Thanks!

[kwebb]

To elaborate further - we have cluster generation kits, flowcells and sequencing kits (v2, 36 cycle, single end) all purchased in Aug 2008. Can anyone comment on whether or not they think we should even bother trying to sequence with these kits?
Does anyone know the shelf life of the cluster generation kits and/or flowcells?

[james hadfield]

We have ued PE kits that were many months out of dat, I would need to check in the lab but at least August of 2008. Results were absoutley fine, PhiX QC was good.

[picabo]

I believe the cluster kits have a shelf life of 6 months and the sequencing kits have a shelf life of 3 months.

We used an old kit and the run failed.

The cluster kit has formamide and NaOH and both of those go bad over time. If you use fresh supplies of those reagents, you might be able to get a successful run.

When we place orders, we place a large order and have them send the kits in multiple shipments. That way we get the discount, but don't have to worry about the kits going bad.

[csquared]

Cluster kits have a very long shelf life. Just used a couple kits that were between 8 and 12 months old with no trouble. Only issue is that the small volume of 2M NaOH suplied in the kit tends to evaporate slightly in the older kits. Since the vol of 2M NaOH that is supplied in the PE kits is much more than needed, we just borrow some from that kit. As long as the flow cell tubes are stored upright, we haven't seen any issues with age. We have not been as confident in the seq kits and so far have used all in the 3 month shelf life.

The instrument is pretty forgiving for the most part. Including the time from primer hyb to seq that Illumina says needs to be 4 hours or less. We've let PE runs sit on the cluster station overnight and started seq in the morning with no issues. If first base looks poor, redo the primer hyb and all is good.