I just wanted to send out a heads up to any users of The Gel Company's
paper combs. We have been using the 48 lane combs to load our gels
successfully for the last few years. Recently, we began seeing a large
number of blank gels. We were fairly certain that there was nothing wrong
with the machines, other equipment, and the sequence reactions (especially
because reactions set up for our 3100 were working beautifully), and
narrowed the problem down to something related to the resuspension of the
samples or the loading of the gels. Our lane tracker guide was also not
consistently working, so the blank lanes were especially troublesome. We
tried throwing out all reagents used to resuspend the samples, and the
problem was still not resolved. I called the Gel Company and asked if they
were aware of any problems with their combs. I was told that in the last
lot of 15,000 48 lane combs, there had only been one complaint made: the
DNA was not coming off of the combs. They promptly sent out combs (free of
charge, and within 48 hours) from a new lot to replace the 140 that we had
on hand, and everything is working exactly as it should be! The lot number
of the affected combs is: 112701. We did not have this problem with all
of the combs from this lot, but it did occur in probably 30% or more. I
hope this saves someone the grief that we went through trying to solve this
problem!
Brynn Anne Watson
DNA Core Facility
Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health
1015 Arlington St., Suite H3380
Winnipeg, MB R3E 3R2
Ph: 204-789-6035
Fax: 204-789-2018
EMail: brynn_watson at hc-sc.gc.ca
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