I am thinking of using a automatic cell counter for my experiments. The TC-20 seems to be a good choice. Is somebody using this machine and could tell me if it is possible to reuse the slides after rinsing and washing, even if this is not advised by the manufacturer. Thanks.
Hi, We use the TC10 and TC20. The results we have found can be highly variable, and really depend on the cell line you are going to count.
In saying this, we have also washed and rinsed the slides - but in our lab, we only used washed and rinsed slides for counts deemed "not necessary to be accurate".
Actually, recently we did trial a number of cell counters - and purchased the ADAM-MC. It really is very accurate - also uses plastic slides that we also rinse and wash.
A link is here:
http://www.nanoentek.com/product.php?id=5
Since then, we have not really used the TC20 anymore. All the best.
Hi, We use the TC10 and TC20. The results we have found can be highly variable, and really depend on the cell line you are going to count.
In saying this, we have also washed and rinsed the slides - but in our lab, we only used washed and rinsed slides for counts deemed "not necessary to be accurate".
Actually, recently we did trial a number of cell counters - and purchased the ADAM-MC. It really is very accurate - also uses plastic slides that we also rinse and wash.
A link is here:
http://www.nanoentek.com/product.php?id=5
Since then, we have not really used the TC20 anymore. All the best.
I used TC10, and overall experience is totally negative. It uses very wide window of sizes to detect cells which eventually leads to very high amount of mis-detected cells. It is especially annoying when I count with trypan blue; as you can see on attached image, its counting is completely wrong: most tiny particles are detected as dead cells (round circles), some particles are detected as alive cells (green circles), and real cells are not detected at all! It became a little bit better when I centrifuged my trypan blue to remove all that "dust" but still was totally unacceptable. Obviously, changing parameters (minimal/maximal diameter etc.) could improve the counting, but I couldn't find any way to do that: there's no firmware on bio-rad site and Bio-Rad support just ignored my request.
Overall, I wouldn't recommend to use this counter, or at least check manually first image for each series of samples.
I agree with Vasily Aushev. We here at KU Leuven have the TC10 and TC20 side by side for those who still use it. Put the same slide in the TC10 and then in the TC20 and you get completely different numbers. Not just a small margin, but 50% different. I too would avoid the TC-series if possible.
I have only just used a demo version (TC20) and noticed better results after filtering the tryphan blue with a 0.2um filter otherwise dust and any contaminants in tryphan blue are counted since the instrument counts anything in the range of 6-50 um. Filtering eliminates this artefact.
I agree with Pascaline- Filtering certainly does help with the accuracy of the counter.
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