Hello Flowers, Thanks for your answers about BD FACScan flow cell longevity. Responses varied (as usual). There were 18 replies. At one extreme, there were about ten people who had scans vintage 1988-90 and had never had a flow cell replaced. At the other extreme, there was one group with a flow cell that had been replaced 4 times since 1988. In the middle, there were several groups who had flow cells that had lasted 4-6 years. I didn't have enough information to correlate longevity with hrs of use or with cleaning routines. A few questions were raised: 1) Do we (or does BD) have a standard test for when a flow cell needs replacement? People running small beads (eg calibrite beads) or small particles (eg platelets) will notice noise from a flow cell and find it troublesome before groups running only leukocytes. Is there a standard amount of noise that is acceptable at standard FSC settings (eg Neal Benson suggests "With a tube of filtered sheath buffer installed on the sample port, high flow rate, E01 and 1.00 as FSC Detector/Gain levels, and FSC threshold=52, we consistently get "background" counts averaging less than 1 event/sec). 2) The underlying theme to most replies is that a rigorous cleaning routine helps to maintain flow cell longevity and therefore the assumption seems to be that the noise that develops with time is related to a dirty flow cell. Our service engineer has implied that flow cells start to get noisy because of degradation at construction joints. I am not sure whether this degradation would be hastened by excessive cleaning with bleach..... 3) There were some sardonic comments that longevity of flow cells might be related to whether or not instruments were under service contract. This could be interpreted to mean that instruments under service contract received better preventive maintenance from trained engineers (or that engineers tried harder to stretch flow cells when BD was having to pay for the replacement). Last I checked, new flow cells were cheaper than service contracts.......so maybe a next subject for discussion would be the pros and cons of service contracts. Thanks again. Alice Alice L. Givan Englert Cell Analysis Laboratory Dartmouth Medical School Lebanon, New Hampshire NH 03756 USA tel 603-650-7661 fax 603-650-6130 e-mail givan@dartmouth.edu
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