Can we use all listed beads (glass, zirconium, steel balls) for all purposes?
The different beads are recommended for different applications, as shown in our bead selection guide. Generally, glass beads are for yeast, bacteria, and low density tissues (brain, liver, etc.). Zirconium silicate and zirconium oxide beads are for tougher tissue, and stainless steel beads for very fibrous or dense samples. That being said, often customers would like to standardize their homogenizations using one type of bead, so if they use difficult tissues (heart, lung, etc) they will use stainless beads and try to stick with them for their other applications because they know how they behave. We offer a variety of types of different sizes and density to give our customers flexibility in developing their own protocols. Given that some tissues are tougher than others, and heavier beads will carry more momentum, it is easy to imagine that one type of bead of a given size and density will have a better grinding behavior than another for a specific tissue.
