CyTOForum

Hi all,

Hope everyone is well.

Does anyone use different reagents to the Maxpar reagents (specifically CSB) which they either bought from a cheaper vendor or made themselves? Or does anyone know the contents in CSB so that I can just make my own? Reason being we're trying to save costs anywhere we can and buying buckets of CSB (costing nearly £100 per 500 mL) does not help at all.

Additionally, I've switched to making my own IdU (I bought the IdU from Sigma in powder format) which has helped to reduce costs greatly and I use the normal Gibco PBS rather than the Maxpar PBS as I don't really see any difference (re background contaminants) when I ran them both (diluted) on the helios.

If anyone has any other helpful alternatives which they use instead of the Maxpar products, please do share as most of us here are funded by charities and thus, every little saving helps in preventing the waste of charity money.

Best,

Jahangir

Hi Jahangir,

Unless there's a specific need to use CSB (multicenter project needing common reagents, etc), we never use it. And even in those cases, we've only used what got shipped with other products like MDIPA: we've never purchased it ourselves as a stand-alone reagent.

We're still using PBS from Rockland rather than MAXPAR PBS (1x= 20mM Potassium Phosphate, 150mM NaCl, pH 7.2; diluted in MilliQ), and using that same Rockland PBS (10x stock) + EDTA (0.5M stock pH 8.0)+ BSA (30% stock in 0.85% NaCl; Sigma #A7284) to make CyFACS (final concentrations: 20mM Potassium Phosphate, 150mM NaCl, pH 7.2; 0.1% BSA; 2.5mM EDTA; diluted in MilliQ).

We started using those when it was still DVS Sciences, and never saw a reason to switch......we have more than a decade of assays with them.


Mike

Hi Jahangir,

We also use the same recipe as Mike with 10X rockland PBS as soon after getting our Helios we decided to use his published recipe. Has worked well for us and when we have used CSB we can't see a difference.
Since there is always a slight possibility that a new bottle could have metal contamination 10X PBS stocks are also a little more convenient although to be honest we have never had a "bad" bottle.

Best,
James