PLOP! AND THERE IT GOES...


For this week, as one of my colleagues is off to Japan for her 1 week honeymoon, I'll be involved in doing QC checks on our ELISA (Enzyme-linked Immunosorbent Assay) Plates as well. As this is a biomedical manufacturing company, it is the standard, mandatory procedure to ascertain whether each new batch of manufactured products meets our in-house criteria before allowing them for sales in the market.

Cool, really. I've been itching to lay my hands on doing ELISA tests. During my attachment days, I was only given the opportunity to have hands-on on Diagnostic Rapid Tests and Western Blots. ELISA tests were, however, left untouched. Most probably because it is one of the more complicated processes as compared to the former two. And probably, there was no sense in teaching something this complicated to an intern who was only attached to the QC department for a mere one week.

And this is what I mean by complicated.

Strong positive result of pre-coated HTLV I/II ELISA Plate

This is an ELISA Plate. And each plate consists of a whooping 8 wells/strips x 12 strips = 96 wells (by "wells", I refer to those circle structures inside the white frame). To simplify things, this is a picture of a ELISA Plate that has been treated with Reactive Control Serum. See the yellow-coloured liquid inside each well? In short, yellow implies a positive result. The darker the shade of yellow, the stronger the positive.

To obtain a quantitative reading of each well, an OD (Optical Density) reading has to be done with a computer. Of course, the darker the shade of yellow, the higher the OD reading for that particular well will be. Technology, huh?


Anyway, for most part of today, I was busying myself with carrying out quality checks on one of the new batches of ELISA Plates which are pre-coated with HTLV I/II (Human T-lymphotropic Virus I/II). Being new and unfamiliar with ELISA tests, I preferred to err on the side of caution, and handled the ELISA plates with more gentleness and fragility than is apparently needed. I was tipping a particular ELISA plate over and emptying the residual serum into the Waste Container when Allan took it from my hands and showed me how they usually do it.

Aiyo. Don't need so gentle. Just shake the plate forcefully. It's okay, one. The strips usually won't drop.

And he gave the ELISA plate a hard shake. And... ... ... Plop!!! One of the strips fell into the Waste Container.

He gasped. I gasped. We both gasped.


And to make things worse, the Waste Container contains Decon 90, which is a strong disinfectant detergent. And as the strip is transparent white in colour, it was already "swimming" in the detergent for a good whole minute before we managed to fish it out.

And for this ELISA test, I was testing on intra-plate specificity. Intra-plate. Meaning that we are determining the consistency of specificity of each and every well within a single plate.
There's nothing that can be done to salvage the situation. Hoping against hope that the Decon 90 has not done any significant damage to the strip, I continued with the remaining processes in the protocol.

It was about an hour later when the second mishap happened. I was emptying the Conjugate Solution when, all of a sudden, the ENTIRE PLATE TOTALLY slipped off my fingers and into the Waste Container AGAIN.

PLOP!!! !!! !!!


I gasped. I gulped. I blinked. My heart skipped a beat. Then I reached in and picked up the plate.

Frantically tapping it dry on a thick wrap of tissue, I was more than before certain that there's no way this plate would have passed the QC requirements. Luckily, it's the same ELISA plate which Allan had unceremoniously "thrown" one of its strips into the same Waste Container an hour ago. Lucky.

And true enough, when I reached the last and final step of the process, this is the result I got.

Blotched up result of HTLV I/II ELISA Plate

Isn't it a far cry from the first picture?

See the entire column of white wells on the extreme right of the photo? That's the strip which Allan dropped into the Decon 90.
And the random white wells in the middle of the plate? They're courtesy of me.

BUT HEY!!! At least I managed to save some wells. But not that it matters at all. Because the result that I am supposed to obtain should be how it looks like as shown the first picture.
And of course, even without needing to obtain a quantitative OD reading, it's obvious even to the naked eye that this ELISA plate is CMI. A sure goner.

Awww... Because of this blunder, I've got to do a repeat on another HTLV I/II ELISA Plate tomorrow.

Awww... ... ...





And this is Allan. And I was teasing him that his back view and side view look so much better than his front. Hohoho.