Sample prepping gets better all the time – cleaner, faster, and cheaper. One of the reasons for better speed and cleaner sampling is the arrival of disposable polypropylene pipette tips, that you throw away after a single use. These really lower processing time, and they do away with any fear of cross-contamination. One of the old bottlenecks in laboratory processing is solid-phase extraction. It’s entirely possible to use disposable tips for this too.
One of our popular products here at Next Day is the Cryo-Safe™ freeze controller from Bel Art. It’s a well-engineered piece of equipment. It absolutely assures a drop in cell temperature of 1°C per minute, and a lot of labs want that, at high precision.
But where does that 1°C gradient rule come from? And is it right for every possible application?
It’s a fair question, and not every person in every lab is always clear about this. So here’s an answer, first in the form of a review of the general challenges in cryopreservation, and then a bit of discussion about cooling rates, and how they’re derived.
