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!

The dog days of summer are here, and I don’t know about you but at times they can have me feeling burnt out! And just like us, our CE machines can burn out from time to time, too. If you’re seeing that annoying yellow light during initialization, it may be time to check your fuses on your ABI 3730 to see if they need to be replaced. 

When we last left our troubled ABI 3730 user a week ago, she was suffering from blue background haze and had tried SeqGen’s previously mentioned tips to no avail. At this point we look for other reasons for the blue haze in her results.

As you may remember, the buffer, or in most cases the buffer make-up water, can cause a blue haze in your electropherograms. If you're having this problem, you need to check and see if there is any leak in the system.This is to make sure the buffer is not getting pulled into the pump piston and accidently passing into the capillary.

Sometimes running into problems can make us better people and build our character. Other times running into problems can make us want to pull our hair out. If you happen to run into a blue background on your array view, don’t stress just yet. Hopefully, this post will keep you from reaching for some Rogaine.