Qiagen Kit Money Saver - (Dec/12/2006 )
Hey all,
This isn't really a question, but my PI found an article with "100 ways to save money in your lab" and one of them we've started doing regularly. We've found that the blue spin columns from Qiagen miniprep kits can be reused by simply boiling them for 10 minutes. We now reuse all of these columns at least once (yield tends to decrease -although it still works- with >2 uses).
Perhaps this is old news for you all -- but even if your lab doesn't want to do this, it might save you some time when you find another person has used up all the spin columns without ordering more! 
Just boiling them for 10 minutes?
I order columns seperately from other company in half price compare to kit, while it still save the total money for us, of course the company earn a lot.
Hey, why don't you post the article your PI found???
This isn't really a question, but my PI found an article with "100 ways to save money in your lab" and one of them we've started doing regularly. We've found that the blue spin columns from Qiagen miniprep kits can be reused by simply boiling them for 10 minutes. We now reuse all of these columns at least once (yield tends to decrease -although it still works- with >2 uses).
Perhaps this is old news for you all -- but even if your lab doesn't want to do this, it might save you some time when you find another person has used up all the spin columns without ordering more!
Qiagen plasmid prep columns are also to recover;
where was this article published? is it to get at www?
Interesting. Please post that article.
Just boil the column for 10 minutes??? No chemical reagents added???
I would force my PI to buy new columns no matter how poor he or she is, rather than getting poor result.
I remember a kit has been mentioned in this forum, it can use for recovery of column about 10 times?
while for boiling method, I'd feel it might work well for recovery of column used for PCR or DNA from gel, and perhaps inefficient for column used in plasmid purification...