RECORD Analyzer cleaning

Situation

Over the last year, there has been a notable increase in the frequency of required service calls on high demand analyzers; Fortessa -1 and Fortessa-2, and to a lesser extent on Fortessa X-20
PM flow facility staff have observed a relaxation of proper instrument cleaning and maintenance.
NEW! Users must record cleaning duration after each use of the instruments.

Since 2020, PM Flow Facility has had numerous repair service incidents due to flow cell, sample line and sample waste line blockage.
This has caused extended instrument down time which has affected your ability to plan your experiments and has resulted in decreased revenue and increased expenses to the facility.

This situation can be avoided if users complete cleaning and maintenance procedures diligently during and after each use of the instrument.
The following precautions are necessary to ensure proper instrument function:
- 15 mins SIT cleaning procedure: 5 mins bleach, water and sheath run at high flow rate
- 1 min sample waste line cleaning procedure: 30 sec bleach and water
- Filter all samples with cell-strainer caps (#352235, BD Falcon), 70 µm cell strainers (#352350, BD Falcon) or nylon mesh with a pore size of 70-100 µm
- Maintain sample cell concentration below threshold rate of 3000 events
- Use better sample buffer: 0.5-2% FBS, 5mM EDTA in PBS/HBSS
- Use DNase if there are large number of dead cells