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How to Buy the Best Pipette Tips?

Pipette tips are important during handling of fluids in a lab. Given their critical role in ensuring accurate fluid transfers, you cannot afford to make your choice based on pipette tips price alone. If you use ill-fitting or poor quality pipette tips it will negatively affect the results of your tests. Because of this, you should buy your tips from vendors with a great reputation. Tips with excellent quality do not have molding flash, no visible defects and are straight. Here are things to consider before making a purchase of pipette tips.

What Are Your Needs?

Pipette tips come in various sizes suitable for different applications. This requires you to know what you intend to achieve in your experiment. The varieties include filtered, extended, non-filtered, microvolume and standard tips. There are also those that are made for automated systems.

Besides, you should also check if the package is convenient and suitable for your application. For instance, non-sterile tips can be bought in racked, bulk and other reload style alternatives. Buying tips in bulk are affordable in most cases. However, you will need to manually sterilize and tack them yourself before use.

Be Careful Of Chemical Additives

Chemical additives can negatively impact your application results because of contamination. Additives are added to help in specific applications like in filtering dyes. If you are looking for high-quality tips, additive-free alternatives are what to go for.

Right Fit

To bring down the chances of error and for more accurate results, the pipette tips must fit right. You should not forcefully fit it and it should not fit loosely either. In instances there are leaks or the ejector fails to function correctly, it probably is a wrong tip.

Low Retention

During the use of a displacement pipettes, the liquid at the tip is always part of the volume measurements. When working with sticky samples like proteins and DNA, the tip often retains part of the sample, even in extremely smooth surfaces. You want to use a tip with low retention properties. Acquiring tips with inbuilt special coating or resin (which protects your samples from contamination).

Filter and Barrier Tips

Barrier tips are made for two reasons — protection of your pipette against aerosols caused during fluids aspiration in the pipette tip and protect against damage and/or contamination when over-pipetting happens. This commonly happens when you use a pipette that fits many sizes of tips and if you select a tip that has little volume than recommended. Such tips are useful particularly for use in sensitive applications. Top quality tips employ filters that change color or block during liquid aspiration.

Test Before Buying

Before taking a final decision on which pipette tip you want, ensure that you test them. This way you will know which specific tips fit your pipettes and which ones will be more effective. Once you have options to pick from, you can now consider pipette tips price and pick pipette tips that you can afford.

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