Sterility

This page is devoted to discussions of the need and means to sterilize the chips and other materials before culture use

No Sterilization

At Stanford, from 2005 until 2008, sterility of the chips was guaranteed by the fabrication process and no extra sterilizations steps were needed. As described in the chip fabrication process, before the last baking step at 80degC (36 hours) all the flow holes on the chip were covered with magic tape to prevent the entrance of any contamination after the baking. With this procedure, there was only one instance of a single fungal spore sprouting in one chamber during an experiment, but it did not affect any of the other chambers.

Benoit Sorre (Rockefeller U.) also reports that he doesn't need to perform any extra sterilization steps after the chip fabrication. This is what he says: "I don't sterilize. I never had issues with contamination (I guess the 48h at 80C in the [fabrication] protocol are enough to sterilize...) it's funny because i remember discussing with some guy from harvard doing mESC that told me that autoclaving the pdms was helping prevent pdms toxicity... I haven't done anything on that myself as in my hands the toxicity don't come from pdms, so don't know what's going on with autoclaving".