cleaning of quartz cuvette?? - especially quartz microplate (cuvette) (Nov/23/2009 )

hi

we recently found out that due to some one's bad useage of "quartz microplate (cuvette)"..have protein precipitations....is tehre any method to clean quartz cuvette???

P.S. one of my collegue told about usage of diluted NaoH for the same...i am little skeptical about it...

thanks

rick112 on Nov 23 2009, 01:53 PM said:

For protein removal is diluted NaOH a good choise, just a few minutes soaking and several times rinsing with demi.

ya u can rinse with methanol... then with pure water.. tehn witht he dilute base and again with water and store
Also found these sites might be useful... not about microplates but tells a lot about quartz!!

http://www.mindat.org/article.php/403/Cleaning+Quartz

http://www.gamineral.org/quartz-cleaning.html

we would occasionally soak our quartz cuvettes in concentrated nitric acid then rinse with dih2o.

you can also use chromic acid (or nochrom-mix if you want to avoid chromium).

rick112 on Nov 23 2009, 02:23 AM said:

Hi Rick,

did you try ultrasonic cleaning or ultrasonically assisted NaOH-cleaning yet. We at Hielscher offer a microplate sonication system for this. You could fill your microplate with water/diluted NaOH or concentrated NaOH and the ultrasonic agitation will assist the cleaning process.

Have a nice day!

Hielscher Ultrasonics

Hielscher_Ultrasonics on Nov 23 2009, 10:29 AM said:

usually we have a little container filled with concentrated nitric acid, every time we finish using the cuvettes, we would spray them with 70 % ethanol, then distilled water, and into the container. We never saw any precipitates and we avoid scratches (some people use little brushes).

Hi Hielscher_Ultrasonics,

I think one should not use ultrasonication for cleaning of quartz cuvette as the high frequencies used in these baths will damage or even shatter your cuvettes....