How to Store Petri Dishes: 10 Best Practices for Lab Sterility and Coating Integrity
Proper storage and handling of petri dishes is a simple but critical part of maintaining sterility, surface integrity, and reproducible results in any research lab. Dust, humidity, scratches, or premature opening can compromise cultures long before they reach the incubator or microscope. Whether you’re using standard culture dishes, ECM-coated formats, or advanced glass-bottom dishes for imaging, following a few key best practices helps protect your samples and ensure consistent performance. This guide walks through the top tips for storing petri dishes of all types, with notes for coated and glass-bottom formats that require additional care.
8 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Using Hemostatic Forceps
In university small animal research, surgical precision directly impacts both data reliability and animal welfare. Hemostatic forceps are essential instruments for controlling bleeding and minimizing trauma. From fine Mosquito Forceps for microsurgery to robust Rochester Carmalt clamps for larger vessels, choosing the right instrument, and using it correctly, can dramatically improve your surgical outcomes.
But even experienced lab teams can fall into bad habits. Here are the most common mistakes to avoid, along with guidance on selecting the best hemostatic forceps for your protocols.
The Impact of Improper Instrument Handling in Labs
University research labs face unique challenges when it comes to proper instrument handling, particularly given the constant rotation of students, postdocs, and visiting researchers. Poor handling practices can derail research projects, waste limited funding, and compromise student safety.
Poly-D-Lysine Coated Culture Dishes: Long-Term Support for Neuronal Cultures
Not all mammalian cell types are simple to grow and maintain in cultures. Some cell types, e.g., NIH 3T3 cells, adhere onto tissue culture plastics easily and has fast doubling time. Some cell types, e.g., neurons are relatively difficult to grow in cultures since these cells tend to adhere poorly onto untreated surfaces and have slower doubling time. These neurons are highly sensitive, anchorage-dependent cells and often need more than a standard culture surface to survive, attach, and develop healthy and normal structural extensions. That’s why many neuroscientists rely on poly-D-lysine (PDL), a synthetic coating that provides stable, long-term support for these neuronal cells
PDL creates a positively charged surface that promotes robust adhesion of cells with low natural affinity to glass or plastic. Unlike its close cousin poly-L-lysine (PLL),
What Are Laboratory Supplies? A Beginner-Friendly Overview
If you’ve ever stepped into a research lab, you know it’s filled with specialized tools and equipment—all essential for keeping experiments running smoothly. When people ask “What are laboratory supplies” the short answer is: they’re the essentials that help scientists and researchers get their work done. That includes everything from basic items like petri dishes and pipettes to more advanced laboratory equipment like microscopes and micromanipulators.
VIDEO: Reasons KWIK-SIL Adhesive is Ideal for Neuroscience Applications
When you are looking for a low toxicity adhesive with some elasticity and good moisture resistance, choose a silicone adhesive.
4 Types of Silicone Adhesives for Life Science Applications
The adhesive you select will depend largely on your biomedical research laboratory application. If you are building electrodes, you might use a silver-filled, conductive epoxy to connect a Ag/AgCl pellet. For instantaneous bonding when mounting a rodent brain slice, you might select an ethyl cyanoacrylate. When you are looking for a low toxicity adhesive with some elasticity and good moisture resistance, a silicone adhesive is the option of choice. When used with living tissue, an adhesive must be:
Why Octyl Cyanoacrylates Adhesives Are Best for Life Sciences
Cyanoacrylate adhesives have been on the market since 1958. Most industrial or household grade cyanoacrylate (like Super Glue) are made of shorter alkyl chain derivatives such as methyl or ethyl cyanoacrylate (WPI #7341 and #7342). They are very useful for temporarily holding tissues such as mounting specimens for microtome sectioning. A family of adhesives containing octyl cyanoacrylate, a plasticizer and stabilizer, was developed In the 1990's (one of them approved by FDA for human use). When bonding to tissue, these new adhesives are four times stronger and less toxic than butyl cyanoacrylate. Compared with the traditional suture, the new super adhesive has several advantages. Cyanoacrylates Not Suitable for Live Animals.
How to Properly Mix a Burstable Sylgard Twin Pack
Sylgard is a 2-part silicone elastomer with a very low dielectric constant, which makes it ideal for patch clamping and many other lab applications, especially in electrophysiology. The twin pack is a convenient, single use sleeve containing both parts of the adhesive. We will show you how to properly mix the Sylgard Twin Pack.
Physical Properties of WPI Glass Capillaries
VIDEO: KWIK-SIL VERSUS KWIK-CAST, What’s The Difference
Both Kwik-Sil and Kwik-Cast are silicone adhesives, but they are a little different.
Buying Glass Capillaries for Making Micropipettes and Microelectrodes
Seven Tips for Avoiding Common Cell Culture Dish Mistakes
Petri cell culture dishes like WPI’s FluoroDishes™ are commonly used in laboratories, but they require precision and care to ensure the accurate results of your work. Let’s look at several common mistakes made with cell culture dishes and how you can avoid them.
How to Clean a Laboratory Syringe
Cleaning laboratory syringes helps prevent contamination and ensures accurate dosing. You should always adhere to the protocols of your institution and the manufacturer of your syringe. Specific cleaning requirements may vary based on the intended use of the syringe, its material composition , and the sample fluid introduced. Here is a typical protocol for cleaning a laboratory syringe.
Common Maintenance Issues with Laboratory Syringes
Laboratory syringes are used for accurate measurement and administration of fluids in medical, laboratory, and industrial settings. Proper maintenance is crucial to ensure their functionality and accuracy. Here we will examine some common maintenance issues you may encounter with your reusable laboratory syringes.
A Brief Introduction to Forceps for Laboratories
Laboratory forceps are surgical instruments that come in a variety of types. Here’s a brief overview to help you choose a set of forceps for your application. Surgical forceps can be divided into two broad categories, thumb forceps (also called tweezers) and hemostatic forceps. Tweezers can be further divided into dressing forceps and tissue forceps.
Choosing a Syringe: Guide to the Different Types of Syringes
Choosing the right syringe type depends on the specific application and the requirements of your task. Syringes come in various sizes, materials, and designs, each suited for different purposes. Here are some factors to consider when selecting a syringe type.
Tips for Choosing a Dependable Lab Equipment Supplier
Choosing a dependable lab equipment supplier is crucial for ensuring the quality, reliability, and timely delivery of the equipment you require. When your research is on the line, you need a company you trust, a supplier with a proven track record and a service team to back you up. Here are a few important considerations when selecting a lab equipment supplier.
Lab Supplies Must Haves When You Need Them
In any laboratory, having key lab supplies is almost as important as having the major equipment. Choosing a reputable supplier of these necessary supplies is as important as having quality laboratory supplies when you need them. WPI wants to be your partner in early drug discovery, and we stock a wide variety of lab supplies, many of which can ship the same business day. Having a variety of lab supplies ready to ship makes us a dependable research partner. Here are some of the popular supplies that we keep on hand to meet your needs for your upcoming experiment
How to Care for Your Surgical Instruments
This article shows you how to appropriately care for your surgical insturments to ensure long lasting, highly functioning tools for your application.
Choosing the Correct Pump
WPI carries a wide variety of fluid handling tools utilizing different technologies:
- Microinjectors
- Peristaltic pumps
- Syringe pumps
- Pneumatic injectors
Factors that Affect the Pulling of Micropipette Glass Capillaries
A PUL-1000 is a micro-processor controlled, four stage horizontal puller that is used for making glass pipettes and microelectrodes. This article defines several factors that affect the pulling of micropipette glass capillaries.
Buying Multi-Barrel Glass Capillaries
Two-barrel, 3-barrel, 5-barrel and 7-barrel glass capillaries are available at WPI. Multi-barrel configurations are designed especially for microiontophoresis. Because the capillaries are fused together during manufacturing, you will not need to twist them while pulling to seal the tips together. An inner filament in each barrel makes filling easy and fast.
504954/504955 Luer to Tubing Coupler Kit Pictures
The barbed tubing assortment kit contains over 250 items. All the items are pictured on a grid below. The darker lines in the image grid represent centimeters, and the smaller ones are 2.5 mm apart.