We bought a loader last summer for a calibur for the precisely the reasons C.Prussin laments about in a recent post. It has been well worth the investment and functions very well for both research and clinical applications. We had some initial problems with the tubes not going up or down correctly but a lube job on the lifting mechanism of the metal shaft that pushes the tubes up fixed that. We also had some concerns about contamination between samples and poor sample measurements recorded during that time of high flow rate the calibur gives when the sample first goes on as there is no option in the s/w to delay acquisition between samples. We have not seen any problems in 8 months worth of data that includes a lot of triplicate testing and racks of PI stained cells that gave histograms with very tight CV's. The only problem I do see is when one's precious sample is resuspended in minimal volume(DCM sleeve on) some of the sample is sucked away while the program is frantically looking for a place to store a one million event file. I know the electronics exist to build a system that can keep track of the total cell count for determining the frequency of a rare population while storing a more modest list-mode file of n parameters of the cells of interest only. I can't be sure this is the reason, but it seems harder to maintain the timing of the second laser now with the loader present-possibly due to the tube being pushed up tight against the cushion/gasket for a good seal moving the whole flow cell assembly above it. Know where the timing screw is. Loader s/w performance on a Quadra was not very good-greatly improved on a power mac. A high speed reliable printer is essential because any printing problems can abort the rack-run. HP color printers with the plastic rollers are terrible. It is hard to get excited by flow after a long time of doing it but I remember breaking into a big smile and being marveled the first time I watched the loader-manager s/w control the sample carousel while running their Multitest s/w that performs expert gating of lymphocytes and subset evaluation in 4 color stained blood samples. We are very satisfied with the loader's performance in a broad range of applications, especially the one mentioned, and have had little trouble with it. Is is hard getting people to use the Scan which doesn't have one...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Apr 03 2002 - 11:51:43 EST