Flow cell manufacturing quality problems?

[cheezemeister]

A few times now we have discovered flow cells with deformed gaskets; the ports are more oval in shape instead of being perfectly round. The first couple times we didn't think much of it and used them anyway, but had the runs terminate in the middle with an error. When the flow cells were pulled out, there was dry salt crusted on the glass near the injection and outlet ports. We discovered another one of these cells today, and decided not to use it, instead opening another kit and getting a "good" flow cell.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[GenoMax]

No we have not anything systematic like this. Are these MiSeq flowcells? Have you kept track of the ID/lot #? Did you report them to illumina tech support?

[cmbetts]

We had several failed runs on the MiSeq at my previous position that were caused by deformed gaskets. We never noticed any issues with the flow cells out of the box, but every so often a run would fail, and one gasket of the flow cell would look like you described, smooshed into an oval with a salty crust.
We thought it was an issue with our instrument mangling the gasket because Illumina's tech support had never heard of anything like it, but maybe we were just on the cutting edge of a new failure mode. Illumina came out to service the instrument several times, but I'm not sure if it was ever resolved, which would make sense if it was a problem with the flow cells.