I need to create a library of compounds and I wanted to ask what is the best way to organize and store the compounds. The library we aim to create is expected to have the following characteristics:
Between 100 and 500 compounds
We want to store between 10 aliquots of each compound
We want compounds to be easily accessible individually and by rows.
I was thinking a perfect consumable would be a series of tubes that could be arranged in 96 well plate format but each tube being individually capped, so that it could be easily taken out and worked with individually similarly to thermo matrix tubes Matrix Tubes | Thermo Fisher Scientific
at the same time it looks pretty cumbersome to open and close these tubes individually. What are everyone thoughts?
Individual storage tubes in a 96-well rack will give you the greatest flexibility and is the standard for most compound management situations. You have a fairly small library so other methods are certainly manageable, but if you decide to grow that library 10-fold, tubes will be the only manageable method that will still give random access to all samples.
Having a 2D barcode on the bottom of the tube is the biggest difference between something like a strip of tubes and Matrix tubes that you linked in your post. The barcode allows you to scan a complete rack of 96 tubes in just a few seconds to either catalog what you have or find a tube quickly. All kinds of other benefits once you move to 2D barcoded tubes, but positive ID of the tube that you want and having that data in a database (or even just Excel) is the main one.
There’s various levels of automated capping/decapping, from handheld, to fully automated of the whole rack. I’ve used both and for small libraries the handheld decapper is very manageable.
If you’re looking for something very un-fancy, my lab has previously made use of a ‘duct-tape and bubble-gum’ approach by way of bio-rad 96well PCR plates combined with EVA cap mats from VWR
It takes some ab strength and a 50mL falcon tube as a roller, but you can squeeze these caps onto the plate fairly snug for freezing and then take them off when you need to use them (we use/used a p20 single and a p300 multi for our media prep)
Alternatively they sell disposable plastic covers for PCR racks as well which have worked for us before. Keep in mind we didn’t need to keep these libraries for an ultra long time (a month or two tops)
