Using bleach (10-20%) for cleaning metal instrument is corrosive. Allowing 5 minutes contact time for bleach followed by wiping with alcohol or water reduces the prescribed contact time for bleach. So, what can be done to clean a metal instrument, from any sort of amplicon contamination, used for DNA extraction, given the instrument was not in a clean room and needs to be cleaned before getting it into a clean room?
If your instrument is made of stainless steel, leaving it in bleach for 5-10 min is unlikely to damage it significantly, unless you repeat this many times. If you are still reluctant to do so, you could also use DNase and rinse afterwards
Pierre Béguin Thank you for your advise. Is there any prescribed contact time for using DNase for this purpose?
If i would stick with bleach, i am worried that 5-10 minutes contact time is not enough to get rid of the amplicon contamination.
Frankly, I have no idea. If there is no protocol available, I would suggest that you try spiking (contaminating) your instrument or some comparable object with a realistic amount (say a few µg) of easily detectable DNA (e.g. some amplicon for which you have available primers for PCR detection) and try which is the minimal treatment required to destroy the DNA below detection. You then increase that treatment by a factor of two for safety.
Article Efficacy Assessment of Nucleic Acid Decontamination Reagents...
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