What's that smell?

September 19, 2015 12:13 AM

I was in a facility that tests a large number of blood samples for a series of diseases and other markers, across multiple testing instruments. I only walked as far into the lab as you can without PPE, but I could instantly smell something... astringent, that feels like it got way up in my sinuses even a few hours later.

Any idea what I was smelling? If I had to guess, it smelled like... industrial cleaners or something like that. The facility moves blood vials from instrument to instrument and I imagine there are significant processes for cleaning and destroying materials. I also imagine there are smells associated with the reagents, the machines themselves, etc.

The office portion of the facility didn't smell out of the ordinary, but I can still feel almost a slight burning in my nose/sinuses and it's been 8 hours.

posted by disillusioned to Science & Nature (5 answers total)

Best answer: Maybe benzene as the mobile phase in hplc testing of the samples. Solvents used in that kind of work can smell really strongly. They're really volatile and stink at super low concentrations in the air. One exposure to low concentrations won't cause any issues but can be gross feeling.
posted by Kalmya at 4:39 AM on September 19, 2015

Did it smell slightly like the old school paste/glue that elementary schools used to use? It could have been phenol or beta-mercaptoethanol. These are used in processing and extracting RNA, DNA, and protein.
posted by the_wintry_mizzenmast at 5:02 AM on September 19, 2015

Best answer: Agree with Kalmya, most organic solvents can do this to your nose; my first thought was acetone. When I was in school, during long synthetic labs my organic chemistry professor used to help us clean our glassware with acetone -- the entire area where she worked (in a fume hood, no less!) reeked in that astringent way, but she maintained that after years in the lab she didn't notice it.
posted by telegraph at 6:28 AM on September 19, 2015

It's probably not betamercaptoethanol. That stuff isn't just 'astringent', it stinks.
posted by quaking fajita at 2:36 PM on September 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

BME (betamercaptoethanol) and DTT smell distinctly like burnt hair, so as quaking fajita noted it's probably not either of those. If it was more cough-droppy or medicinal-smelling, it could certainly be phenol; in my experience the smell carries quite a bit just from tiny traces that might make it outside of the fume hood.

Acetone would be on the sweeter side of solvents, but in my experience it's not in super common use to clean glassware in biology labs (bio labs use a lot of disposable plasticware vs. reusable glassware, and I think bio glassware washing is mostly detergent, bleach, and autoclaving). The solvents I've encountered most often in biochemistry settings would probably be methanol, isopropanol, chloroform, and acetonitrile (the last two smell kind of ether-y and sweet, the first two smell like, well, alcohol).

But if it's a blood lab, my guess is it was the smell of blood mixed with bleach to decontaminate it -- I remember that smell being pretty pervasive when I worked in a blood biochemistry lab in college, though I'm sort of at a loss as to how to describe it more specifically. I remember it as distinct from just bleach by itself, so the oxidized blood must have added a certain something. (We also did some ammonium salt precipitations and those didn't smell great either.)
posted by en forme de poire at 1:04 AM on September 20, 2015