| Dude, even professional labs with well trained technicians and state of the art equipment suffer through contamination. My FOAF has tossed a LOT of projects to contaminants. A LOT of projects. He lost an entire run to cobweb mold because his air exchange died. Weeks and weeks of work…all with lovely snow white beards.
If you get a 50% success rate, especially your first time at bat, you are doing pretty damned well, IMHO.
If the containers were sealed, it is extremely doubtful that the trich left one and migrated to the other. Not impossible, but extremely doubtful.
There are lots of reasons why those tubs could have gone green:
1> The didn’t get completely sterilized (trich was there from the get go).
2> They “inhaled” some trich spores during the cooling/shrinking process.
3> Some trich spores got on your syringe needle.
Cleanliness NEVER hurts, but as long as you are in the environment, the environment can never be 100% clean.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about. I never get worried until I start to pass the 30%-40% contaminated mark. That is when I start thinking, “Hmmmm…we’ve got a big hole in sterile procedure…”
One suggestion: GET RID OF THAT CONTAMINATED JAR. Once contaminants (especially trich) get a foothold in your environment, they can be an absolute beast to get rid of! |