How to choose laboratory pipette tips?
As with any pipette, its performance and accuracy can be severely compromised by the use of poor quality or unsuitable tips. Pipettes and pipette tips as a system can only ensure accurate transfer and delivery of liquids if they are matched to each other. After mastering the correct pipetting technique and matching the recommended tips, the accuracy of pipetting can be guaranteed.
Generally divided into: ① bagged tips, ② boxed tips, ③ low adsorption tips, ④ filter tips, ⑤ automatic tips, and more.
Transparent Tips VS. Colored Tips
At present, the tips on the market are basically made of polypropylene plastic (a colorless and transparent plastic with high chemical inertness and a wide temperature range). However, the same polypropylene can vary greatly in quality: high-quality tips are generally made of natural polypropylene, while cheap tips are likely to use recycled polypropylene plastic (in this case, the most you can say Its main component is polypropylene).
In addition, most tips will add a small amount of additives during the manufacturing process, the common ones are:
1. Color rendering material. The commonly known blue tip (1000ul) and yellow tip (200ul) in the market are the addition of corresponding color-developing materials to polypropylene (we hope it is high-quality masterbatches, not cheap industrial pigments);
2. Release agent. Help the tip to break away from the mold quickly after forming. Of course, the more additives, the higher the chance of undesired chemical reactions occurring during pipetting.
Filter tips are used to avoid cross-contamination during pipetting or contamination of the pipette by aerosol particles generated during pipetting without any difference in the performance of the pipette. Filter tips are recommended to prevent DNA or RNA contamination (genomic applications, PCR) or to pipette volatile solutions to prevent potentially corrosive vapors from entering the pipette and damaging the plunger.
Standard Tips VS. Filter Tips
Low retention tips have two main advantages over standard polypropylene tips. First, they help to maximize the expulsion of sample liquid from the tip, regardless of the composition or physical properties of the liquid. This means that viscous liquids and other stubborn liquids, such as those with reduced surface tension, will be dispensed optimally.
Second, for laboratories that routinely pipet a series of different sample liquids, the low carryover surface “normalizes” the movement of liquid into and out of the tip. This means that the pipetting precision of liquids with different compositions and physical properties is adjusted to maintain greater uniformity when routinely using a variety of different liquids with different physical properties in a specific laboratory environment.
Standard Tips VS. Low Retention Tips
Extended tips are much longer and slightly narrower than standard tips. These are designed to provide additional “reach” when pipetting and are recommended for extracting samples from certain tall and narrow containers, such as tubes and vials, where standard length tips cannot reach them.
Standard Tips VS. Extended Tips
The packaging forms of suction tips mainly include bags and boxes. In a relatively mature market, box packaging accounts for the majority; in China, bag packaging is currently the absolute mainstream—mainly bag packaging is cheap. The so-called bagging means that the tips are packed in plastic ziplock bags, 500 or 1000 per bag (the number of large-range tips per bag will be much less).
Most users will buy the tips in bags, and then manually put the tips into the tip box. Although China’s labor is relatively cheap, it also increases the chance of contaminating the tips! In addition, a new form of packaging has emerged in recent years, that is, refill packs (8-plate or 10-plate tips are stacked in a tower shape, and the tips can be quickly loaded into the tip box without touching the tips).
The tips require less storage space and use significantly less plastic, making them environmentally friendly. Although the share of this form in the country is still very small, it must be the general trend in the long run.
Tips in Bags VS. Tips in Racks
Compared with standard pipetting tips, automatic tips are mainly adapted to pipetting workstations, automatic sample adding systems, and high-throughput pipetting experiments. It can be used for genomics, proteomics, cytomics, immunoassay, metabolomics, biopharmaceutical R&D and other commonly used high-throughput pipetting requirements.
The automatic pipetting workstation is a fully automatic operation. The suction head moves in the form of a whole to pipette the same volume, which greatly reduces labor costs and human errors. It can free experimenters from complicated experimental operations, and achieve higher efficiency and standardization. , Improve data security and traceability.