What is the cost per sample for a Cellometer slide? (trypan etc)
Nexcelom recommends you dilute your trypan blue stock to 0.2% with PBS followed by filtration with a 0.2 micron filter. Then, mix this stain with your cells in a 1:1 ratio. Let’s say you were to purchase a 100 mL bottle of 0.4% trypan blue for $19.12. Since you are diluting the stock to 0.2%, you have around 200 mL of working trypan blue solution. 200 mL is equal to 200,000 uL. If you were to add 20 uL Trypan blue to 20 uL of sample per slide, you can get around 200,000 uL * (1 slide/20uL) = 10,000 slides worth of reagent. Therefore, using trypan blue will cost about $19.12 / 10,000 slides = 0.001912 cents per slide. Most scientists use the SD100 slides and purchase them by the case, which comes out to be less than 80 cents per count. Even after you add in the 2/1000ths of a cent from the trypan, your grand total would be under $0.80 per count!