Does anyone know where to get the rubber tubing and the mouth-piece used to pick embryos or load the injection needles? ???
It’s called an aspirator tube assembly. We last purchased ours from Fisher Scientific (part # 21-180-10) but they are made by a company called Drummond Scientific (part # 2-000-000). You can get them almost anywhere… VWR (#53507-278), and even from Amazon! (http://www.amazon.com/Drummond-Calibrated-Micropipets-Aspirator-Tube/dp/B0017Y45LS).
To avoid the hassle of mouth pipetting, you can also load injection needles by touching a drop pushed slightly out from the end of a 200ul pipet tip (a drop of maybe 0.2-0.4 ul) to the top of the needle. If you put too much on or if you aren’t careful with how you apply the drop, surface tension won’t hold the drop and it will start to run down the outside of the needle, but if this happens you can just remove the drop from the side of the needle, wait for the top of the needle to dry, and try again.
You’ll still want to mouth-pipet the worms off the pad after injection, of course.