Which is maximum time lag between blood drawing (clot formation) and centrifugation? Is there a way to increase this time (to e.g. 24h)?
May recommendation to froze the serum.
see ; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679668/
Depends on what you want to use the serum for. Most serum proteins are stable, so overnight at 4 degrees before centrifugation is fine, but if you are interested in diagnostic markers, cytokines, etc then serum should be processed and frozen as soon as possible after clot formation.
Hi Hanna, you need to be a bit more specific about what your intentions are.
You can have blood clot in a tube within minutes, spin out the cells, collect serum and store at 4oC.
You can keep clotted blood in tubes for days at 4oC and still be able to get serum, but that serum will have hemoglobin and other cellular proteins from lysed blood cells.
Hanna,
it is related to what you wish to measure. Glucose would be decrease over time, because of RBC use. RBC lysation will increase the activity of cytosolic enzyme especially SOD and CAT, also potassium. On the other hand, RBC lysation will produce red color in serum, which can interfere colorimetric assays. Low temperature will delay the mention processes.
Thank you all for the answers... I wanted to run ELISA test for IL-4.
The problem is that there is no centrifuge in the department where samples are collected so I wanted to know how fast they have to be transported to our lab to be centrifuged.
Hi Hanna, unless you have a lab in Spain and you have to walk the samples from Poland, you are fine.
Depending upon what you are trying to do testing with. I would not recommend to wait for up to 24 hrs to centrifuge the specimen if you are going to test the heat labile proteins, such as, Factor V and VIII. You would want to centrifuge as soon as the clot formation is complete and separate the serum from the RBCs if plain red top specimen is used and refrigerate the serum ASAP. It is always a good practice to separate the serum from RBCs for storate because the RBCs will continue to hemolyze as time goes and serum could possible turn pink-red.
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