In laboratories across the globe, you will find glass jars scattered across lab benches, typically sealed with a flimsy piece of aluminum foil.
These jars hold a jumble of 1.5mL tubes, often called "Eppendorf tubes", a mainstay of laboratory liquid handling, sample processing and storage.
While the vast majority of these micro centrifuge tubes are certified to be RNase and DNase free, its common practice to autoclave them prior to use to ensure their sterility.
This is time consuming and places the laboratory at the mercy of the autoclave schedule, and runs the risk of disrupting research should the autoclave go down.
A better alternative does exist.
Stellar Scientific offers pre-sterilized microtubes that are lot certified to be sterile by gamma irradiation.
The original format came to be known as our T3 micro tube, named because of the three quality upgrades that improved the user experience:
1. They are sterilized and do not need to be autoclaved
2. The bottom of the bags are gusseted to allow them to stand up-right and not topple over and spill their contents
3. Each bag of five-hundred microcentrifuge tubes include, ten tube-lock caps to be used when heating the tubes above 75C in a dry bath.
For our cell-culture customers, we rolled out an improved 1.5mL tube that divides each bag of five-hundred micro centrifuge tubes into ten smaller packs of fifty tubes.
This allows the user to rip open a bag inside the BSC hood without contaminating the remaining tubes in the larger bag.
This was quickly followed by pre-sterilized micro centrifuge tubes in rainbow colors. First to be released were versions of the T3 tube in bags of a single color (500 to a bag).
Not long after came the ultimate in sterility - a micro centrifuge tube offering the ability to color coordinate research based on project or personnel.
These new rainbow colored centrifuge tubes feature ten bags of fifty tubes, divided by five-beautiful colors.
Lab managers looking for ways to improve the efficiency and organization of their laboratories will appreciate the many valuable features these micro tubes provide.