I'm really confused about this and hopefully someone on here can clear it up for me I'm reading a journal article and one of their procedures confused me. The researchers used a swab on dried saliva and then the swab was mixed in a plastic cuvet containing 2 mL of KCL solution and than the solution in the plastic cuvet was transferred to a quartz cuvet which was then used in a fluorescence spectrometer. My question is, why did they use a plastic cuvet and then transfer it? Why couldn't they used the quartz cuvet directly?THanks so much
Plastic cuvettes are cheaper than quartz, for one! Did they mix the fluorescent dye in the plastic, too? I'd have to see what they were measuring, but you do know that plastic adsorbs certain materials that quartz will not. Perhaps there was some fraction of the saliva solution that they did not want transferred over. When doing antibody research, we routinely used plasticware to make the antigens stick to the plastic. That is a possible explanation.
