Dear colleagues,
I work in a genome sequencing facility in NewYork, which houses 4 ABI 3700
DNA sequencers.
Of late, curious things have been happening with two of our machines : In
particular, the autoloader has been crashing into the electrophoretic
chamber and damaging the loading tips. This has happened 3 times with one
3700 and two times with the other; For each machine, ABI replaced the
autoloader head twice and recalibrated the offsets................yet the
problem persists.
I am imformed by ABI in England that problems of this sort are recognised
as genuine and seem to correlate with use of the foil piercing module.
For another of our 3700's, the instrument will sometimes skip the first 96
well segment of a run; We routinely run 2 384 well plates at a time. In
addition, we have experienced other glitches such as machine jamming during
data collection and inability to quite data collection from the program
itself or from 'task manager'. Our thinking is to reinstall the collection
software.
I would be gratefull if anyone could comment on the above and ,if anyone
else has experienced these problems, what the response of ABI has been
Gratefully yours,
Laurence S Hall
Laurence Hall,
Einstein Genome Centre,
1695 Poplar Street,
New York 10461.
Tel. (00) 1 718 405 8380
Fax. (00) 1 718 405 8383
E-Mail : LHall@megabase.aecom.yu.edu
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