It's difficult to avoid contamination, since everything (samples, containers, equipements, etc) will have been in contact with glove at least once, and good decontamination is very hard.
replyYes, exactly, that's why you use control samples to get the baseline.
replyYou see how it's a bit of a self-starting problem?
replyLet's say you want to determine the amount of microplastics in ocean water samples.
replyYou'd create a control by creating saline solution with distilled water and sodium chloride. Then you treat both the control and your sample(s) the same way in the analysis.
Surely something should tick you off when the microplastic levels aren't much lower in your control compared to your actual sample?
They are handling both the control and the sample with gloves. Which is the same way. They are contaminating both. It's useless to argue about how contamination could have theoretically been avoided in an alternate past in hindisght. You don't realize there's a potential contaminant until you do and then you mitigate it. I'm sure they are smart enough now that they realize they are systematically introducing contaminants, they will be able to figure out how to control for it.
reply>They are handling both the control and the sample with gloves. Which is the same way. They are contaminating both.
replyThat's the point. If the control also gets contaminated then they should get >0 results in the control (when basically zero was expected) and that should have raised awareness of this problem pretty much immediately.
Freshly cleaved mica has an extremely clean and flat surface.
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