Magnetic field inhomogeneities due to CO 2 incubator shelves: a source of experimental confounding and variability?

MAKINISTIAN, L.; BELYAEV, I.

Royal Society Open Science

The Royal Society Publishing

Año: 2018 vol. 5

A thorough assessment of the static magnetic field (SMF)inside a CO2 incubator allowed us to identify non-negligibleinhomogeneities close to the floor, ceiling, walls and the door.Given that incubator?s shelves are made of a non-magneticstainless steel alloy, we did not expect any important effectof them on the SMF. Surprisingly, we did find relativelystrong distortion of the SMF due to shelves. Indeed, ourhigh-resolution maps of the SMF revealed that distortionis such that field intensities differing by a factor of up to36 were measured on the surface of the shelf at locationsonly few millimetres apart from each other. Furthermore,the most intense of these fields was around five timesgreater than the ones found inside the incubator (withoutthe metallic shelves in), while the lowest one was around 10times lower, reaching the so-called hypomagnetic field range.Our findings, together with a survey of the literature onbiological effects of hypomagnetic fields, soundly support theidea that SMF inhomogeneities inside incubators, especiallydue to shelves? holes, are a potential source of confoundingand variability in experiments with cell cultures kept in anincubator.