Cross contamination can waste hours of work.
You risk it every time you use quartz cuvettes when you don’t have to.
When you’re testing DNA, RNA, and proteins, use these economical disposable cuvettes instead and completely eliminate the risk of sample carryover.
Take some stress off your colleagues’ shoulders
Everyone in the lab is stressed because there’s lots to do. And productivity expectations are unrealistic.
Here’s one way to relieve some stress and make everybody more productive without pushing them even harder.
- It takes 20+ minutes to wash delicate quartz cuvettes, depending on your SOP.
- It takes <1 second to throw out disposable cuvettes and get on with your day.
- Invest in a productivity increase that will make your colleagues happy. And your life easier.
How do UV-cuvettes compare to other plastic and quartz cuvettes?
UV-cuvettes are the disposable alternative to quartz cuvettes for applications that require UV transparency.
Unlike Polystyrene (PS) and Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA or "acrylic") cuvettes, the UV-cuvettes available here are transparent down to 230 nm, so they are suited to molecular biology applications, such as A260/280 purity determinations and other analyses in the UV wavelength range.
Besides their UV-transparency, this proprietary plastic is also more resistant to chemical attack than PS or PMMA, and so may
bring disposability to applications in which disposable cuvettes were not previously an option because of limited compatibility.
Benefits of disposability
Disposable cuvettes have many advantages over quartz.
- Since quartz cuvettes are so expensive, typically costing hundreds of dollars, UV-cuvettes costing much less than a dollar each are economical.
- They eliminate the risk of sample carryover, so they can enhance the reliability of analytical results.
- They eliminate time-wasting washing of cuvettes; taking 5 minutes to wash and dry a cuvette costs more than the price of a UV-cuvette, even when the work is done by a student.
- The one-time use eliminates the risk of scratching or breaking expensive quartz cuvettes.
- Lastly, in molecular biology applications, the availability of individually wrapped UV-cuvettes, free of DNA, DNase and RNase, provides superior protection for your samples that is not available with reusable quartz cuvettes.
When should you still use quartz cuvettes?
No plastic is as clear as quartz.
In certain applications–such as an extremely dilute sample where the utmost in sensitivity is essential–quartz may be the only option, and you'll have to sacrifice the advantages of disposable.
With typical samples, including DNA and RNA, just use the disposable cuvette as your "blank" or standard, and the spectrophotometer will adjust for the difference in absorbance between quartz and plastic.
The cost of disposable cuvettes is very low. So place a test order and see for yourself.
Disposable cuvette FAQs
Q: What is the light path of these cuvettes?
A: Every model at Scilogex has a light path of 10mm.
Q: What’s the difference between PS and UV cuvettes?
A: Polystyrene (PS) cuvettes are the least expensive, and have the lowest chemical resistance. They’re suitable for visible light applications, with a lower wavelength limit of around 340nm. The UV-Cuvettes available at Scilogex use a proprietary plastic developed by Brandtech allowing measurements as low as 230nm. They resist many polar organics and most acids and bases.
Q: What’s the highest temperature suitable for UV cuvettes?
A: To be safe, never exceed 70°C with these cuvettes.
Q: Are any sterile UV cuvettes available?
A: Ultra-micro UV-cuvettes are available individually wrapped, DNA-, DNase-, RNase-free. But because they have not undergone a sterilization procedure, we can not call them sterile. This is universal with all UV-transparent cuvettes on the market - none of them have undergone a sterilization procedure.
The UV-cuvettes cannot be autoclaved because it destroys the cuvette’s optical qualities. The caps are made of polyethylene, and can not be autoclaved either.
They are manufactured under clean room conditions.
Q: My results with UV-cuvettes are different than quartz. Why?
A: They are not as transparent as quartz. As such, when using UV-cuvettes, any reference measurements should also be done with UV-cuvettes.
Ready to test disposable cuvettes in your application? Get started here