Persistent contamination and Nebulizer issues
Hi Everyone,
We’ve been experiencing 3 different consistent problems with our CyTOF 2:
1.Persistent Iodine contamination – Fluidigm’s solution is always to change the sample line, change the nebulizer, change the tuning solution, water etc etc. We have done that and that still persists. Has anyone experienced this and if so, has anyone identified the source?
2. Barium events coinciding with Iridium events – We’ve noticed in ALL samples that we’ve run that there is consistently with almost all events identified as a cell event by Iridium, an equivalent puff that coincides with Barium. The samples have had nothing done to them (no special drug treatments or imaging). This has happened with ALL users samples from different labs and all the users all use Fluidigm’s Fix/Perm reagents, buffers and water and we are seeing this consistent Barium puff. We could almost use it instead of Iridium as the intercalator to identify cell events instead of Iridium!
3. Nebulizers – We’ve been averaging 1 run a nebulizer recently before some kind of trouble. We filter all our samples immediately before running them, and then eventually we see dramatically decreased event rate, signals drop. Short of seeing a drip, how does everyone identify that there may be some kind of partial clog? We would expect to see leaking at one of the points in the sample line caused by back pressure from a clog but recently we experienced what seems to be a partial clog without any dripping… Do people clean their glassware with Citranox?
The frustrating thing is that Fluidigm always logs in, makes us clean for almost an hour and then eventually tells us to change our nebulizer and/or sample line and we can just keep changing them every single run, that’s impractical and expensive and wastes time. Any insight would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Claude
We’ve been experiencing 3 different consistent problems with our CyTOF 2:
1.Persistent Iodine contamination – Fluidigm’s solution is always to change the sample line, change the nebulizer, change the tuning solution, water etc etc. We have done that and that still persists. Has anyone experienced this and if so, has anyone identified the source?
2. Barium events coinciding with Iridium events – We’ve noticed in ALL samples that we’ve run that there is consistently with almost all events identified as a cell event by Iridium, an equivalent puff that coincides with Barium. The samples have had nothing done to them (no special drug treatments or imaging). This has happened with ALL users samples from different labs and all the users all use Fluidigm’s Fix/Perm reagents, buffers and water and we are seeing this consistent Barium puff. We could almost use it instead of Iridium as the intercalator to identify cell events instead of Iridium!
3. Nebulizers – We’ve been averaging 1 run a nebulizer recently before some kind of trouble. We filter all our samples immediately before running them, and then eventually we see dramatically decreased event rate, signals drop. Short of seeing a drip, how does everyone identify that there may be some kind of partial clog? We would expect to see leaking at one of the points in the sample line caused by back pressure from a clog but recently we experienced what seems to be a partial clog without any dripping… Do people clean their glassware with Citranox?
The frustrating thing is that Fluidigm always logs in, makes us clean for almost an hour and then eventually tells us to change our nebulizer and/or sample line and we can just keep changing them every single run, that’s impractical and expensive and wastes time. Any insight would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Claude