If you’ve been following our blog, you know that regular maintenance is key to the health of your machines. We all know that our sequencers are made up of a bunch of smaller parts. We also know that eventually some of these parts wear out and it’s time to dig into the piggy bank to cover the new pieces if you do not enjoy Platinum coverage with SeqGen for your capillary electrophoresis machines.

Unfortunately, we haven’t found a way to beat Father Time when it comes to wear and tear on certain parts, but there are some things you can do to hold him off.

As if weekly maintenance wasn’t enough, there are still some procedures that you should go through twice per month to ensure your sequencer’s health. When it comes to bi-monthly maintenance, start by checking the polymer. The most common question we hear at SeqGen is “How often should I change the polymer on my machine?”

If you’ve been working with your ABI 3130/xl or 3730/xl for any length of time, you’ve probably asked yourself, “Which takes more time to maintain—a sequencer, or a newborn baby?

We would have to call it a toss-up, but if you’d like, you can give us any insight into this question in the comment section.

Even though it might seem as if the recommended weekly and bi-weekly maintenance is thorough enough, monthly maintenance protocol is recommended as well. Here are some of our favorite maintenance tips sure to make your life easier in the long run.

If your lab is like ours, you know that a week can come and go in the blink of an eye! You’re just minding your own business, running samples, and all of a sudden another week can be checked off the calendar. This isn’t a bad thing; you know the saying—time flies when you’re having fun! But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be taking care of your equipment in the meantime.

At the start of every week, there are a few procedures to perform to make sure that your machine is running at peak performance. Before you dive headfirst into your samples, it’s best to make sure you are starting with a clean slate, otherwise your machine could end up looking like this.

We all know that our sequencers need constant maintenance and attention to stay at the top of their game, but keeping up with each and every tiny moving part on these machines can seem daunting.

One of the little parts on the ABI 3130/xl, 3730/xl, 3500/xl to stay on top of is the piston. If you neglect to take care of this piston, the polymer can back-flow into the pump motor, which can cause serious problems (and an expensive service visit) down the road. Flushing the water trap is the easiest way to care for it. So to make sure your traps and pistons are squeaky-clean, follow these six easy steps to flush the trap on your ABI sequencers.

There are few other things in this world more frustrating than getting the cold shoulder for a reason you can’t even guess. Is your sequencer’s data collection software giving you the cold shoulder? And by cold shoulder we’re actually referring to the yellow triangle status. 

This is a fairly common problem that can be explained by a multitude of causes, luckily we have a solution. Some of the most common times we see this is when the computer name has been changed or incorrectly changing the settings on the computer can lead to this mishap. In order to ensure that the computer name is set correctly, follow these four easy steps.

For every problem you may encounter with any of your machines, we are here to help you find the solution. If your 3130 or 3730 is giving  you an error which reads: “Electrical Discharge Error,” one of the possible causes could be an issue with your pump’s one-way check valve . The error may indicate that the valve is malfunctioning, resulting in the back-flow of liquid to the polymer bottle. This leads to incomplete filling of your array and causes the old polymer to remain in the capillary.  The end result is a bad spatial intensity, as well as an electrical discharge error.

What is going on in the cosmos? We seem to be receiving a lot of calls and emails regarding the ABI 3730 autosampler.  A very common error reported is: “Autosampler Detect a Non-assigned tray”.  

This can be an especially tricky issue to deal with since the autosampler relies on many moving parts. To walk you through this problem and get your machine back up and running, we’ve compiled a few tips we’ve learned from dealing with these machines in the field.

Dealing with sequencer problems is hard enough when your machine notifies you of what’s wrong. But working with a machine that won’t give you any information can make you want to crawl under a rock. 

A common service issue we see on 31xx and 3730 series machines is failure of the CCD camera. You may recognize this scenario: You arrive early Monday morning ready for a productive day of sequencing, load your plates, and then disaster strikes!  All that appears in the array viewer is a black screen. Panic mode sets in. After a deep calming breath, you email SeqGen the screen captures for our expert engineers to review and troubleshoot. Within 2 hours, SeqGen’s expert team responds by email and then by telephone:  “We are very sorry to report that your CCD camera has passed away.”  RIP, CCD Camera. You gave us some great years!

If you are wondering about ongoing maintenance for your ABI 3130/xl Genetic Analyzer, or 7900HT qPCR, you aren’t alone. Thermofisher has announced that they will discontinue service for these machines in the not too distant future.

As a matter of fact, if you have one of these machines you’ve probably already gotten a notice saying that you’ll have to upgrade your technology if you’d like to continue maintenance. Lucky for you, SeqGen plans on covering these machines for many years to come!