28 Aug The Centrifuge in the Corner Is a Reproducibility Variable Nobody Logs
Ask a core-facility manager which instrument on the floor gets the least scrutiny relative to how often it runs, and the answer is almost always the same. The bench centrifuge. It spins forty times a day, everybody touches it, and its maintenance record lives on a piece of tape on the lid. Yet every plasma prep, PBMC isolation, and miniprep passes through it. When that instrument drifts, the drift shows up downstream as a biology result that another lab cannot repeat. According to FDA Good Laboratory Practice regulations, equipment used in regulated research must be adequately inspected, cleaned, maintained, calibrated, and standardized, with records retained that document each of those activities — requirements that apply directly to centrifuges used in GLP-compliant studies.
Most labs treat a centrifuge as plumbing: it works or it breaks. The more honest view is that it is a measurement device with three outputs that quietly go wrong: relative centrifugal force, temperature, and time. Two of the three are rarely checked.
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