Importance of certified pyrogen-free tubes? - (Nov/06/2015 )

Any idea how much pyrogen is likely to in microcentrifuge tubes that aren't certified pyrogen-free? I want them to store plasmid for transfection.

For transfection of what? If you don't use it subsequently in humans or animals, you will hardly ever notice any pyrogen. These are small chemical substances, that are know to cause fever (i.e. activate the immune system) in injected into blood or so. If you use it for bacteria or cell culture, you don't have any immune system there.

For human or animal use, all things must be (I hope) pyrogen-free certified, so that there is no possible harm comming from a plastics. But otherwise it's just a "clean made" tube, that may have traces of whatever and you are only interested in those, that may damage your product, in case od plasmids it should be DNase-free.

Transfection of chicken primordial germ cells (primary cells) and DF-1 (immortalised chicken fibroblast) cultures. Certified-pyrogen-free tubes are pretty cheap for us so I've started using them for anything cell culture related but I'll talk to my supervisor about what receptors he reckons might be susceptible to pyrogens in PGCs.