Hi. We just signed a contract for the Immucor Echo and manual capture workstation. I was told to have unbuffered saline available to make into PBS with Immucor's pHix reagent. I am trying to get a handle on the different salines...

Currently we use Nerl Blood Bank Saline pH 7.0-7.2 which I was under the assumption was a phosphate buffered saline... However, to comply with Immucor's request for installation, I purchased S/P Certified Blood Bank Saline from Cardinal Health to add the pHix to.

So now...do I use the S/P Certified saline for everything else in the blood bank and add pHix to a cube for the Capture and Echo and only buy one kind of saline...OR....do I keep the Nerl Saline for everything else and buy the S/P Saline for Capture/Echo?

What is everybody elso doing?

Thanks for your help!

We use the pHix buffered saline for all of our work.

We make up one cube of the S/P Certified BB Saline plus pHix to use for the Echo and we use the S/P Certified BB Saline for everything else in BB. However, if many others are using the pHix buffered saline for everything else in BB, it seems that you could do whichever you prefer.

When I talked to Immucor's technical people about my Fetalscreen issues, I was told that Immucor uses the pHix buffered saline for everything they do. We are still using NERL buffered saline for our manual testing and pHix buffered saline for the Echo. My rationale for this is... I've been too lazy to do any validation studies to switch saline. Since I have 2 cubes of saline open all the time anyway, it hasn't been an urgent thing. I would say, do whatever works best for you.

We keep only one kind of saline. pHix buffered for everything works just fine.

Linda Frederick

what is the expiration date are you using for NERL saline? Is it one month from the date of opening?

The box doesn't suggest any date unlike fisher saline???

We used to use Nerl too. I think we had to request an MSDS sheet or insert to find out that it had a open date expiration. I wish it had been on the box.

I put a 1 month outdate on opened boxes of NERL saline.

We had this same discussion with Immucor when we got our Echo. The only reason they could give me for Phix vs. Nerl is that is what they used to get licensed. We were adding Phix to Nerl saline and decided we were double buffering. We now use Nerl buffered saline, but check the pH before we put it on the machine. We have had no issues.

We had this same discussion with Immucor when we got our Echo. The only reason they could give me for Phix vs. Nerl is that is what they used to get licensed. We were adding Phix to Nerl saline and decided we were double buffering. We now use Nerl buffered saline, but check the pH before we put it on the machine. We have had no issues.

I think that checking the pH is a reasonable thing to do if using the NERL saline.

We used Phixed saline for our Echo and certified saline for everything else, but have recently switched to Phixed saline for everything since Immucor's package insert changed for the rosette test.

We also use Phixed saline for all of our testing.