Real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a commonly used technique in molecular biology. It is used to quantify the targeted DNA by detecting the fluorescence. Of course, there is a real-time PCR machine in my department. More than one week ago, the result of real-time PCR suddenly became strange. For the sample with different dilution, one had signal (fluorescence signal), the other did not. My collaborator and I didn’t know where the problem was from. We tried templates (DNA), primers and the reagent used to amplify DNA, and we found the signal totally disappeared for each sample. Then we thought the problem may be from the machine. I asked the other users who had used the machine in this week and they said they got no signal either. The machine was broken. But none of them had reported the problem to the technician in charge. It took me more than a week to find the origin of the problem, and I used three sets for testing, each cost about 500 HKD.
Now you get my point. If the other users could report the problem earlier, I could save the money of my laboratory and labor of mine. We need cooperation between persons, laboratories, departments, universities, cities, and counties. If we can’t cooperate well, we will lose more than money and labor.