Are the Bioneer kits any good?

[pristis pristis]

Farah, Vivek, and I attempted to PCR the EF1-alpha promoter region of Crassostrea gigas last Sunday using a Bioneer AccuPower PyroHotStart kit last Sunday. (I am aware that this is a bit excessive for general-purpose PCR, but it looked like we had a lot of those kits on hand— until it turned out that those were all well plates…) We got back an entirely blank gel, both a ladder and PCR products.

Either the gel box light is broken or our reagents have expired. A drop of our ladder aliquot showed no fluorescence, so it’s certainly possible that the ladder aliquots we found in the community freezer are no longer viable. (The ladder solution we had previously, which definitely worked, has gone missing, along with our gel dye.)

I’ve learned that we had an agreement with Bioneer wherein we received expired kits and they got to write said kits off as charitable donations on their taxes. The PCR kit we used had an expiration date in 2017. I’m curious whether anyone has had some experience using these expired Bioneer kits: do they actually work? There is no mention of them in the Cuttlefish Project meeting notes apart from last week’s PCR.

—Tristan