From the Lab: What No One Tells You About Storing Cryogenic Samples Properly

When most people think about IVF lab equipment, they think about the big-ticket items — the incubators, the microscopes, the nitrogen tanks. What rarely gets discussed are the small things that prevent large problems.

I am talking about cryocanes, cryosleeves, visotubes, and cane coders. These four products form the organisational layer of cryogenic storage. They are not glamorous, but they are what the system runs on. A cryocane holds your samples in position inside the liquid nitrogen canister. The cryosleeve protects the loaded cane during handling — that brief moment when you pull it up and out. The visotube is the transparent container that keeps your straw visible and organised. And the coder tells you, at a glance, which cane holds which group of samples without exposing anything unnecessarily to room temperature. Used properly, these four things together mean faster retrievals, lower sample exposure times, and a colour-coded system that any embryologist can read immediately. 

Cryolab stocks the complete range for UK labs: https://cryolab.co.uk/product-category/storage-accessories/