i am karen and i want to speak to the manager of whoever the fuck decided THIS was the appropriate container format for an extremely sensitive and contamination-prone enzymatic reaction that is essential to molecular biology research at literally every level

you can't access the middle wells without uncapping the outer wells?? and you can't take the collective caps off without your gloved finger inevitably grazing a cap interior??? and you have to hold 5 things with 2 hands to do a simple liquid transfer??? DO NOT SIGN ME THE FUCK UP

I stayed late to fill 12 of these bad boys with RNA standards and I do not have even 10% confidence that they're not all or mostly contaminated and all that extra time wasnt wasted

Tomorrow I'm going to ask if we can just put standards in 96 well plates, and waste massive amounts of unreclaimable, adhesive-tainted aluminum by sealing and unsealing them over and over as we go

DOES ANYONE KNOW

WHY PCR STRIPS EXIST

PLEASE

You can always just sever the ties with a pair of scissors, but then you have a bunch of minuscule plastic tubes that are incredibly easy to lose!!!!

no PCR strips

the world has evolved past the need for PCR strips

if you cut em up with a pair of scissors they get harder to uncap, inversely related to the size of the pieces you cut them into, because you lose leverage proportionately and now you're grasping desperately w yr gloved hand at a tiny little scrap of plastic to uncap your vessel

My only conjecture as to why PCR strips exist: cheaper than 96 well plates and most applications don't require all 96 wells

Another reason why these things shouldn't exist, lest we forget: EVERYONE STICKING THEIR GLOVED-BUT-UNSTERILE MITTS INTO THE RESEALABLE PLASTIC BAGS THAT HOLD THE TUBES AND THE CAPS SEPARATELY

tbf Eppendorf tubes have this same exact issue but at least they prove their utility in other ways

I awkwardly shimmy one unit at a time up to the mouth of that ziploc-esque bag and push it up and outward, only grabbing it with my gloved hand once it's out of the bounds of the bag, but I think that's just because I'm a tryhard because I used to get weird looks for doing that

yes there's probably a better way, and yes this thread is bounded by my limited frame of reference in all the labs I've worked in for the past 6+ years, and frankly yes this thread makes me look silly for not finding outside-of-the-box solutions to these extremely menial problems