Reducing Reagent Waste in Multichannel Reservoirs

Reagent reservoirs are commonly used to hold liquid that will be aspirated using multichannel pipettes. Considering the potentially high cost of many reagents, it is highly desirable to employ a reservoir design that minimizes the residual or “dead” volume of reagent that cannot be aspirated from the reservoir. Seven commercially available reagent reservoirs were tested to determine the residual reagent volume when aspirating with an eight channel pipette. Distilled water as well as liquids of varying surface tension were tested. The reservoirs manufactured by VistaLab were shown to have up to 67% less residual volumes than the other reagent reservoirs with distilled water and 54% less with other tested liquids.