Data from: Magnetic field inhomogeneities due to CO2 incubators shelves: a source of experimental confounding and variability?

A thorough assessment of the static magnetic field (SMF) inside a CO2 incubator allowed us to identify non-negligible inhomogeneities close to the floor, ceiling, walls, and the door. Given that incubator’s shelves are made of a non-magnetic stainless steel alloy, we did not expect any important effect of them on the SMF. Surprisingly, we did find relatively strong distortion of the SMF due to shelves. Indeed, our high-resolution maps of the SMF revealed that distortion is such that field intensities differing by a factor of up to 36 were measured on the surface of the shelf at locations only few millimeters apart from each other. Further, the most intense of these fields was around 5 times greater than the ones found inside the incubator (without the metallic shelves in), while the lowest one was around 10 times lower, reaching the so called hypomagnetic field range. Our findings, together with a survey of the literature on biological effects of hypomagnetic fields soundly support the idea that SMF inhomogeneities inside incubators, especially due to shelvesˈ holes, are a potential source of confounding and variability in experiments with cell cultures kept in an incubator.

本研究对CO₂培养箱内部的静态磁场（static magnetic field, SMF）开展全面评估后，发现其靠近箱底、箱顶、内壁与箱门处存在不可忽略的磁场不均匀性。鉴于该培养箱的搁板由非磁性不锈钢合金制成，我们原本未预料到搁板会对静态磁场产生显著影响。但令人意外的是，我们确实发现搁板会导致静态磁场出现较为明显的畸变。事实上，我们绘制的静态磁场高分辨率分布图显示，搁板表面仅相距数毫米的不同位置，其测得的磁场强度最大相差可达36倍。此外，这些畸变后的磁场中，最强处的场强约为未安装金属搁板时培养箱内部场强的5倍，而最弱处则约为其1/10，达到了所谓的亚磁场（hypomagnetic field）范围。结合我们针对亚磁场生物效应开展的文献调研，本研究结果有力支持了如下观点：培养箱内部的静态磁场不均匀性——尤其是由搁板开孔引发的不均匀性——可能成为培养箱内细胞培养实验的潜在混杂因素与实验变异性来源。