E20 disappearing beads....

[RPiddock]

An E20 (5500) run recently completed on our enricher, but there are no beads in the output tube (but a correct volume of ~4ml). There are also no unenriched beads, but no beads left in the sample tube!

They seem to be nowhere in the machine (none in the filter either), I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on the subject?

There were definately beads loaded onto the machine and I do not want to do any more runs until I know if the machine has faltered or not.

I have done an E20 run just yesterday on the machine and it was fine, tried ringing tech support but cannot get through.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

[VanessaS]

How about in the waste bottle? If I recall correctly, if your filter is bad or if it is breached, they can go to waste. I've not heard of this happening on an E20 but we have had it happen on E80's and the upgraded software fixed the issue. The upgrade sends smaller aliquots of beads to the filter at multiple times instead of all at once. I feel your pain, its not a happy feeling to have missing beads.

[RPiddock]

Hi Vanessa,

That's what we thought too, and it has since been confirmed by engineers. There seems to be a dodgey batch of filters out at the moment and I have had several filter failures, some meaning more library has to be made.

Thanks for your help!

[sciencegnome]

Please share the lot number of the filters. Thanks

[RPiddock]

We had problems with lot 813454 2013-07 and one failure with 1146017 2014-02.

I'm sure not ALL of the filters were affected but these are the lots that I personally had issues with.

[sciencegnome]

Thanks. Filter breakage was an issue we had a while ago (not since the enrichers got upgraded to include the E120 protocol), so I'm always wary of it now.