Flutterby™! : Plastic labware screwing up results

Wired Science blog reports on an article in Science about plastic lab gear contaminating lab results:

The additives are used to prevent static buildup, reduce stickiness and eliminate bacterial colonization. But many have been shown to interact with proteins, and to leach from food containers into their contents. Holt's team is just the first to quantify this in a laboratory context — and in labs, where researchers can use thousands of pipettes and other disposable tools in a day, there's no way to avoid plastic.

"Interpretation of data is being complicated by these issues, to the extent that it seems possible that incorrect conclusions have been made based on 'contaminated' data, and that such conclusions have been published," wrote Holt and his colleagues. "Our progress ... is being hampered and costing more than it should."

Extrapolation of possible impacts on use of similar plastics for food preparation are left as an exercise to the paranoid reader, but when we re-work our plumbing I'm leaning towards copper.