Evaporation at 20C in 96-Well Plate

Model Organism: Worms Methods & Reagents
1

Hi Everyone,

I am establishing liquid culture techniques to grow worms in a 96-well plate at 20C. Our 20C environmental chamber has significant air flow from the fan which is leading to substantial evaporation of our liquid media. We’ve used the following approaches to try to reduce evaporation but none have proven to be effective:

-plastic lid on plate
-plastic lid on plate and put in plastic worm culture box
-plastic lid on plate and seal bottom plate and lid with parafilm
-seal plate with parafilm “lid” (no plastic lid)

We have a few other permutations we’ll try to prevent evaporation but I’m curious what other folks use to reduce evaporation in environmental chambers that have strong fans/air flow? Our funds are limited so we are looking to use common lab supplies to seal the plates while allowing for adequate gas exchange. If you suggest microplate sealing tapes, can you please provide a brand and catalog number that has worked well for you?

Thanks!

2

Two no-cost solutions: 1) disconnect the fan; or 2) increase the humidity in the chamber by adding beakers of water.

3

Another method I’ve seen to increase humidity is to soak a stack of paper towels in water. The stack of wet paper towels can then be placed in a plastic box next to the stack of 96-well plates. I think the plastic box can then be parafilmed, though I wasn’t closely involved and my memory is imperfect.

4

Helllo

As described in Quantitative and automated high-throughput genome-wide RNAi screens in C. elegans (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22395785)
we use AeraSeal cellular culture film from Dutscher (http://www.excelscientific.com/aeraseal_content.html)

5

Thanks for all of the suggestions! We’ll try them.