To keep your lab up to code, you have to validate new instruments, take care of equipment, and fix problems all the time. Most of the time, pipette tips aren’t even on your list of things to worry about in the lab. Don’t forget how important the tips of the pipettes are. Choosing the right pipette tips is helpful in increasing the accuracy of lab results and also saving costs by retention of reagents and chemicals left over.
Standard vs Low Retention Pipette Tips
When you want to buy pipette tips, you have two main choices. Do you need the tips for the standard style or the low retention style? Standard pipette tips have been used for decades and can be found in labs all over the world. They are cheap and well-known to researchers, but they leave behind a lot of fluid.
Labs can get rid of a lot less waste with low-retention pipettes, and they are also more accurate and easier to use. Each of these options has different benefits that can save your lab money and help you get more accurate results.
Low Retention Tips Are Cost Saving Than Standard Tips
On average, tips with low retention cost 25% more than tips with normal retention. Standard tips may seem like the obvious choice because of how much they cost, but low retention tips help labs save money on expensive calibrators and reagents. A usual study showed that when standard tip pipettes are used, there may be as much as 4 uL of liquid left over. When doing bulk QC, that might not be a big deal, but if you are working with rare or expensive reagents, that loss can have a big effect on your budget and research.
Low Retention Tips Are good for Viscous Reagents
The viscosity of your solutions and reagents can cause problems with surface tension in standard tips. This means that more sample is left behind, which can change the results of your lab work.
Low retention Biomek pipette tips have a surface that repels water and an air gap for safety. This lets them deliver the right amount every time, with none of the leftover waste that comes with regular pipette tips. If you’re working with more viscous reagents, you might want to switch from a standard tip to a low-retention tip to get more accurate results.
Retention Tips Are More Accurate
Air gap technology is used in low retention tips to lower the surface tension of liquid during pipetting. This keeps the reagent from leaking out. Also, it reduces the amount of dead volume that standard pipettes need so that technologists don’t add that volume by accident when testing.
For everyday chemical lab work, a standard pipette may be accurate enough for testing, but if you work with small or sensitive volumes, you should use a pipette with a low retention tip.
Wrap Up:
In lab work, the goal is to be 100% accurate, but most managers know that they need to find a balance between accuracy and Cost. Pipette tips may not be expensive to buy, but if labs don’t use the right ones, they could waste reagents and lose more money while getting the wrong results. This risk is eliminated by the pipette tips at our online store. Check out our different options, like Aluminum sealing films that are heat and cold-resistant, making them ideal for PCR and cold storage. They can be used for incubation, transport, light-sensitive samples, and high-throughput screening. The film is a convenient replacement for heat-sealing devices and mats during thermal cycling.
