Recovery of serum directly from serum separator tubes

Recovery of serum from serum separator tubes in hospital laboratories is a tedious and laborious manual process that is also prone to human errors that could lead to false negative or false positive results. Using the STARline platform will enable you to:

Hospital laboratories use serum separator tubes (SST) to create serum for clinical chemistry tests. Serum separator tubes contain a special gel matrix that acts as a barrier between the blood cells and the serum, as well as particles to cause blood to clot quickly. The gel matrix can cause problems with automation of pipetting as it can block the end of a pipette tip. Usually only a small volume of the serum is sampled from the tube for clinical chemistry tests leaving a large volume of serum available for archiving. Hamilton has developed a protocol to aliquot serum directly from serum separator tubes which uses the Monitored Air Displacement (MAD) feature of the STAR Line instruments to detect the gel allowing the recovery of the maximum possible amount of serum, uncontaminated by gel matrix. Testing of this protocol revealed it could also be used for EDTA plasma samples.

We have developed a protocol to recover gel free serum directly from serum separator tubes that uses the MAD feature of the STARlet to detect the presence of the gel that separates the serum from the red blood cells. If the gel is detected during the aspiration of an aliquot, the sample is put back into the tube and the sample not used again. Testing in customer labs has revealed that the same principals could be applied to the aliquoting of EDTA plasma samples where the white blood cell layer that separated the plasma from the red blood cells would start to block the tip and trigger the pressure sensor which would result in the sample being put back into the source tube. The ability to aliquot EDTA samples has also been built into the protocol.

 For full method and description see the pdf file attached