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Tapemark's Environmental Stability Testing With Tamar Kranz

Posted by: Tamar Kranz on Aug 21, 2019 9:57:17 AM

[Transcript] "Hi, my name is Tamar Kranz and I'm a Chemist 1 here at Tapemark. Another piece of equipment that we use in our environmental monitoring program is the RCS sampler which stands for a Rotary Centrifugal Sampler. We test the air in our control rooms for microbes that could contaminate our products. So how it works is this top part spins and pulls a specific amount of air into it, which forces any particles or microbes onto a strip auger. So here we have our sterile strip of auger. There's plastic on the back of the exposed part. Here is the auger that will be used in the test. So it's placing faced down when we place it back on here and put the cover back on. And it runs for about a minute spinning and pulling in about 160 liters of air. So any microbes in the air will be forced onto the auger strip. Once it's done, we take it out and place it back in the plastic cover and incubate it for 3-5 days. Here I have an example of a strip that has some microbial growth on it. I don't know if you can see those, but there are some clumps of organisms on here called the Colony Forming Units or CFU's. A lot of CFU's is an indication that there are a lot of microbes in the air in our control rooms. That indicates that we need to do a sanitizing or cleaning. Thank you for watching."

Topics: Analytical Services, Equipment & Facilities, Quality and Regulatory