Favorite labware for low dead volume?

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I’m looking for a single row reservoir for particularly expensive reagents - does anyone have a favorite low dead volume option? We’re using PCR plates as a source right now, but it would be nice to be able to pour the reagent in rather than having to pipette into 12 wells before going onto the platform.

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I looked into this a bit and this was the “lowest dead volume” claim I saw for single well reservoirs. I was able to get some sample labware from them. We didn’t end up using the labware because the method development was too far into it to change the labware at that point, and we didn’t have time to perform validation with the new reservoir.

Alternatively there are reservoirs divided into 8 rows.
https://www.lvl-technologies.com/en/liquidhandling/reagent-reservoirs-engl/row-reservoire

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I can second the Integra reservoirs. We use the 12 Column variation on a lot of our applications.

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Agilent/Seahorse has some 24 column reservoirs some of my customers use on their Microlab PREPs. Here is one of the options:
https://www.agilent.com/store/productDetail.jsp?catalogId=201296-100&catId=SubCat1ECS_897119

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what’s a tolerable dead volume ?
12 column SBS style is popular - but 500-600 uL dead volume is normally too high

depending on the instrument type, i;ve found simplest/optimum approach is a single source eppendorf tube, aliquotted into an 8 well PCR strip and then pipetted from this 8 tube layout to destination wells

<20 uL dead volume in src tube, then 3-4 uL dead volume per tube of PCR strip - cumulative waste is < 50 uL

but it’s all relative to the target speed of the process & whether volumes fit

can you provide more details on volumes you start with, and volumes you need to distribute across how many wells ?

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Thanks everyone. I’ve seen the Integra reservoirs but have never used them, nice to see they actually work as advertised.

We’re going to try an 8 row Axygen and see how that goes, but this is only a 5uL transfer, so we will likely have more dead volume than usable volume. It’s probable that we will just have to aliquot into a PCR strip manually - this is going on a Lynx, so I could use a single tip to do the aliquot on deck but it’s probably not worth the time. As for a tolerable dead volume - have you ever gotten an answer from a scientist other than “as little as possible”? :grinning:

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Classic v-bottom PCR plates or reservoirs that mimic that form factor are great; the Integra offerings are also excellent. Thermo makes some nice hard shell bases for unskirted PCR plates that have made me a lot more flexible about using all kinds of v-bottom / conical plate types in my work.

I also really like Nunc untreated polypropylene 450uL v-bottom 96-wells: they’re good down to <10uL before the well contents bead/wick to one side and are lo/no bind when working with nucleic acids and proteins. We make 3-4X qPCR reactions in those then plate them out triplicate/quadruplicate in 384 wells with very minimal dead volume regularly in my lab.

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Try this

I love these as u can use these both for channels and head

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@Stefan I would consider these kind of questions in the General section perfect for process engineering since process development is also quite a bit about picking the proper consumables/setup

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