I never used preservatives but I also never stored the buffer more than 5 days. René J.
--- On Wed, 2/24/10, Amos Brooks <amosbro...@gmail.com> wrote: From: Amos Brooks <amosbro...@gmail.com> Subject: [Histonet] Tris Buffer Preservative To: "histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu" <histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu> Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2010, 11:59 AM Hi, I have been making up my own tris buffer for immunohistochemistry. It has been working swimmingly, with one exception. I have been doing some work on Salmonella, and apparently the researcher has been seeing bacteria in her immunofluorescent slides that she says are moving and seem to be viable. She wanted to culture all my reagents. So the primary and secondary antibody diluents (commercially purchased) came up clean, but the TBS ended up with a pretty healthy growing colony. Now since I don't do IHC overnight in an incubator, I don't think this is necessarily a catastrophy. (No one else has noticed this) It does seem to warrant further investigation though. So for the folks that make their own solutions up, what do you use as a preservative for your buffers and how much do you use. I haven't seen anything in any of the recipes I have found. I was thinking Sodium Azide, but it is really hazardous, and Wikipedia says it is actually explosive ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_azide). Biocare Medical's data sheet says they use less than 0.25% procyclin. (thanks for not hiding the ingredients Biocare, I love you for that!) Has anyone tried that? Any other suggestions would be welcome. Thanks, Amos _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet