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SRN's avatar

Naive question: can the chip be re-used, possibly after some treatment? I'd imagine that the underlying imaging apparatus is unharmed during the run; only needs surface cleaning and restoration..

Could even be shipped back to PacBio for said treatment. Would it be worthwhile, or is the chip of negligible cost?

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Nava Whiteford's avatar

I think this is likely possible. I think it may even be possible to build a system for reloading constructs onto a chip during the run.

The larger question around this being worthwhile or not is however much more complicated. And would need quite a lot more thinking through. Reuse would no doubt reduce quality somewhat (or result in lower yield). It may also impact revenue. So, technically possible I would imagine, but would need some time to think through the implications.

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SRN's avatar

Do you have a rough idea of how much the chip costs? So if the run is priced at about 1000$, how much of that is chip cogs?

I wonder if you could just treat a post-run chip with nucleases and protease and then reload? Or even just nuclease to remove the old library, now that pacbio have a purportedly more stable polymerase..

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