The collection went smoothly thanks to the tips in the other threads on the board linked below, but I spilled less than half an ounce (a couple of spoonfuls) of the 10 oz preservative bottle contents on my bathroom tile floor, and got a bit on my fingers. It washed off easily enough, but I’m just wondering what it is?
The bottle just says “Preservative 290 ml less than 10% EDTA in Tris buffered solution” together with lot numbers and an expiration date
The website says:
The bottle of liquid contains a preservative (less than 10% EDTA in Tris buffered solution).
What does this mean?
EDTA is pretty near ubiquitous for its low toxicity and general safety and its ability to bind metal ions out of a material that needs to be preserved from metal ion oxydation reactions.
Thank you @gnoitall ! And LOL, duh, I didn’t know that EDTA was the name of the bottle contents; it looked like a code for something I didn’t know about. Actually, I’d never heard of EDTA before. Good to know that it’s safe and has low toxicity.
And Tris is short for 2-amino-2-(hydroxymethyl)propane-1,3-diol which is a buffer that should keep the pH in the neighborhood of about 8. It also might function as a chelating agent but probably (I’m just guessing) not as good as EDTA.