ConA beads often become clumpy or sticky after overnight incubation at 4˚C. Some clumping is normal, and should not impact your data.
However, if you start with a sample of poor quality - meaning lysed cells and/or poor cellular integrity - you may experience more ConA bead clumping. Excessive bead clumping leads to sample loss, reduces yields, and negatively impacts data quality. Thus, it is key to minimize bead clumping as much as possible during your experiment.
Each of our CUTANA™ protocols and kit manuals contains guidance on how to resuspend ConA beads. It is critical to keep beads resuspended during enzyme binding to help ensure even distribution.
When working with sticky ConA beads, keep the following notes in mind:
Beads can be dispersed by gentle pipetting or vortexing; follow specific instructions in the assay protocol.
The end of a pipette tip can be cut off to help mix or preserve delicate cells or plant nuclei.
To help keep beads in solution you can vortex reactions before and after incubation steps; always quick spin in a mini-centrifuge before opening tubes.