The Effectiveness of Hot Bead Sterilization in Maintaining Sterile Surgical Instrument Tips across Sequential Mouse Surgeries.

One strategy commonly employed for rodent surgeries is a "tips-only" surgical technique, which restricts the surgeon to using only the sterile working ends of the surgical instruments to manipulate the surgical field and sterilizes instrument tips with a hot bead sterilizer between consecutive rodents. Despite the common use of the "tips-only" technique, research is lacking on the number of sequential surgeries for which the same set of hot bead-sterilized instruments can be used before introducing bacterial contamination. We performed serial mouse surgeries using the "tips-only" technique under 3 different conditions (aseptic, fur contamination, or cecal contamination) and assessed aerobic bacterial growth before and after each round of hot bead sterilization.