Re: CyTOF XT Performance in comparison to Helios

Dear Mike,
I am happy to give an update on the contamination situation, albeit a bit late.
CAS+ was used as the suspension medium in both samples (Helios and XT).
After a rigorous acid wash by our FlowCore engineer, the lanthanum and cerium contamination is gone. We are still stumped as to where it originated from. Our only hypothesis is that it came from previously analyzed samples which came from smokers.
As for the barium and lead, they are still present at a constant 10-20 dual counts, but that doesn't seem to noticeably affect other channels.
Concerning the clogging, I have experienced problems with clogging while running fixed whole blood samples (total leukocytes only). Clogging occurred only once while running high-quality samples, but happened repeatedly when running a whole blood sample of not-so-high quality (coagulation occurred due to improper use of EDTA vacutainers, several rounds of filtering and DNAse were done on these samples). The auto-unclogging procedure failed to resolve any of the clogs. We had to pause the machine and switch to a clean nebulizer to continue running.
- Luka
I am happy to give an update on the contamination situation, albeit a bit late.
CAS+ was used as the suspension medium in both samples (Helios and XT).
After a rigorous acid wash by our FlowCore engineer, the lanthanum and cerium contamination is gone. We are still stumped as to where it originated from. Our only hypothesis is that it came from previously analyzed samples which came from smokers.
As for the barium and lead, they are still present at a constant 10-20 dual counts, but that doesn't seem to noticeably affect other channels.
Concerning the clogging, I have experienced problems with clogging while running fixed whole blood samples (total leukocytes only). Clogging occurred only once while running high-quality samples, but happened repeatedly when running a whole blood sample of not-so-high quality (coagulation occurred due to improper use of EDTA vacutainers, several rounds of filtering and DNAse were done on these samples). The auto-unclogging procedure failed to resolve any of the clogs. We had to pause the machine and switch to a clean nebulizer to continue running.
- Luka