MISSION 2: Yellowstone National Park
The goal of Mission 2 was to examine the effects of warm & cold fluids (thermal disequilibrium) on pipette performance and data integrity.
In May, the Expedition Team traveled to Yellowstone National Park, which is
well-known for its extreme geothermal features. Boiling mud pots, erupting
geysers and steam fumaroles are set in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming where air
temperatures routinely fall below zero and lakes usually remain frozen well
into late May. This area exhibits some of the steepest geothermal gradients in
North America. Those extreme thermal contrasts represent ideal conditions to
illustrate, on a larger scale, the phenomena laboratorians experience when
working with pipettes under conditions of thermal disequilibrium.
ARTEL tested pipettes from leading manufacturers for dispensing accuracy and
precision as measured with the ARTEL PCS® Pipette Calibration System. A robust, portable system, PCS is unaffected by
environmental conditions. The PCS also provides standardized, NIST-traceable
results for a scientifically sound comparison of data regardless of the
environment in which data are taken or pipettes are used.
THE EXPERIMENT
The protocol for this mission called for pipetting solutions of three different
temperatures with pipettes and tips that were thermally equilibrated at ambient
temperature (daytime Yellowstone temperature, around 20°C). Temperatures of the samples were chosen to represent temperatures commonly
encountered in routine laboratory procedures: temperatures in the range between
freezing and 4°C, as well as in the range of 37-40°C were compared to samples at ambient temperature (20-22°C). Target volumes of the cold and warm samples delivered by the pipettes were
compared to the target volumes delivered of the ambient temperature sample. To
ensure consistency in pipetting technique, the scientists performing this work
were trained and certified using the ARTEL Method.™
The obtained field results were challenged in the lab by a set of experiments
conducted under controlled conditions, following the same protocol.
RESULTS
